Headwaters

A conversation with Katie Pfennigs, who is the Director of External Affairs and Energy Services at the Flathead Electric Cooperative. This episode was recorded in May 2024.

Headwaters is created by Daniel Lombardi, Gaby Eseverri, Peri Sasnett, and Madeline Vinh.

Glacier Conservancy: glacier.org/headwaters Frank Waln music: www.instagram.com/frankwaln/ Stella Nall art: www.instagram.com/stella.nall/

Climate change in Glacier: www.nps.gov/glac/learn/nature/climate-change.htm

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TRANSCRIPT:

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Lacy: Headwaters is brought to you by the Glacier National Park Conservancy.

Peri: This is Headwaters, a show about how Glacier National Park is connected to everything else. My name is Peri, and I'm speaking into a microphone pretty much entirely powered with renewable electricity. That's because the Pacific Northwest has a lot of big hydroelectric dams, but also because Glacier has been installing rooftop solar to supplement the power we draw from the grid. This episode is part of our Climate Conversations series about how the world is being altered by the burning of fossil fuels. Over the past century and a half, human activity has emitted enough greenhouse gases to warm the Earth's climate more than one degree Celsius, with more warming on the way. Daniel has been sitting down with experts to talk about how that warming is altering Glacier National Park, our lives and our futures. Like a lot of places, we are transitioning away from fossil fuels here at the park. That means swapping fossil fuel appliances and vehicles with electric alternatives. [mellow beat beginsto play ] As you'll hear in this episode, this is not an easy transition. To do it, we're going to need a lot more electricity -- something like three times more than we currently generate in America. But according to the nonprofit Rewiring America, the good news is that because electricity is so much more efficient, will only need about half as much energy as we're currently using. These climate conversations don't have to be listened to in any order. Each one stands on its own. This one was recorded in the spring of 2024 when my co-host, Daniel, talked with Katie Pfennigs from Flathead Electric Co-op, which is the organization that provides power to the west side of the park. I think I might have learned more from this one than any other in the series, so I hope you enjoy it.

Daniel: Welcome to Headquarters. We're going to talk about climate and electricity and electrical solutions to climate change. Could you introduce yourself? And I'm curious what you like about your job at Flathead Electric Co-op.

Katie: Sure. I'm Katie Pfennigs. I am the community relations manager at Flathead Electric Co-op. It's a lot of fun.

Daniel: Yeah. What do you think's kept you there for almost a decade?

Katie: You know, I grew up in the Flathead. I came back after my undergraduate work, and I just-- I love this area. I love this community. And working at a co-op is so community based. Really, it's just it just feels like a way for me to to have a really positive and significant impact on the community that I love.

Daniel: Yeah, say more about that. What is an electric co-op?

Katie: So kind of a unique, a unique business model. But a cooperative is actually owned by all of the members that we serve. So if you pay a bill to Flathead Electric for your electricity, you are in fact, an owner of the co-op. There is no-- no profit. There are no shareholders. So really, it's just a really neat way to operate a business. Very, very member centric.

Daniel: So nationally there are for-profit electric companies, I assume?

Katie: Yes.

Daniel: And they they create electricity and send it to their customers in order to generate a profit. But that's not what Flathead electric Co-op does.

Katie: Exactly.

Daniel: It's community owned.

Katie: Exactly. Yes. Yep. We were, you know, when we we were very first started it was during the time right after the Rural Electrification Act, which, you know, that act was landmark legislation that that really changed the way that rural America looked in that it provided opportunities for some of the rural parts of our country that had no access to electricity. You know, Flathead Electric is is like all other co-ops in that we had a group of farmers who who came together and pooled resources and got some funding through the Rural Electrification Act to start Flathead Electric Co-op and started very, very small. And we've grown today to serve just over 58,000 members.

Daniel: So the Rural Electrification Act, REA, it was a New Deal, Great Depression-era program. 1936.

Katie: Yes. And then Flathead Electric was was founded in 1937. Following that.

Daniel: My understanding was basically rural areas like this one, like Montana, there wasn't enough money to be made for for-profit electric companies to string power lines out to ranches and small towns.

Katie: You've got it. Yeah. At the time. At the time, a lot of people thought that electrifying the rural parts of our country just was not economically feasible or just could not happen. So it did take legislation to accomplish that, that goal.

Daniel: Wow. And now so that was it was about 90 years ago. And Flathead Electric Co-op has been here ever since then.

Katie: We have. And we've grown and, you know, since then went through a fairly large acquisition. And and we're somewhat unique in that we don't only serve rural areas. A lot of the co-ops in the country just serve the the rural areas, the outskirts of the the municipalities. But Flathead Electric actually serves the municipal areas of, you know, Kalispell, Whitefish, Columbia Falls, Bigfork, and then all the way up to Libby as well, which does make us a little bit unique in the co-op world and also contributes to us being the largest co-op in in the state of Montana by a long shot and second largest utility to Northwestern Energy that's an investor owned utility.

Daniel: Okay. Do you think Flathead Electric, is it also a an energy utility? Is that the category you'd put it in or is that a little different?

Katie: I would put us in the category of an electric utility.

Daniel: Okay.

Katie: Energy really is a much broader concept than electricity. You know, energy really is just the ability to to do work. And electricity is a form of energy where you're taking that work and running it through some sort of a generation facility, you know, whether that's hydropower, so-- which is what powers most of our area, you're right. But that's, you know, taking that that running water, that motion and running it through a hydroelectric dam to generate electricity and then transmitting that to power homes to do a different type of work. Right? In homes and businesses.

Daniel: Yeah. Okay. Here in Glacier, we are then dealing with multiple utilities because we use we're using propane or using natural gas often to heat our buildings. But then we're working with Flathead Electric Co-op. We're getting electricity to run our computers and turn the lights on and everything.

Katie: You know, when someone has access to natural gas, typically that's what they're using for their home, home heating and water heating, which are the two biggest users of electricity or energy in a home, and then the park is very similar. So you might have electrically powered lights and outlets and, you know, whatever whatever else your needs are that aren't hooked to natural gas, aren't hooked to propane.

Daniel: Yeah, exactly. We have a combination of both in Glacier. And one of the downsides to that is that there's quite a bit more greenhouse gas emissions associated with burning fossil fuels like gas and propane. But before we get into that, a big thing that you deal with then is the grid. What is the grid?

Katie: Right. So the grid, if we're just talking about the physical grid, is everything from the generating facility -- so again, I'll use hydropower as as my example here because that's the world I live in. And so everything from the hydroelectric dam, And then that power is then transmitted, right? You have to always have to get power from where it's generated to where it's needed. And the way that that's done is through the rest of the grid, which is a transmission system of of high voltage transmission lines and then a series of substations and transformers that transform that, that high-voltage electricity into a lower voltage that can be carried over a series of distribution lines. And that's what Flathead Electric does as a-- we're a distribution co-op. So we build the distribution system, which is the part of the grid that carries it carries that power to homes and businesses in our service area where that power is again stepped down. So that it can be served right into your your home or your business or whatever that need may be. So there's another another step in that grid.

Daniel: Okay.

Katie: So everything from the generating facility through the transmission system in the substations and then our distribution system and right to where it gets to your your home would be considered the grid.

Daniel: Well, then let's go to the first step in that process. Generation, electrical generation around here, we have several hydroelectric facilities and like regionally, there's a lot of hydroelectric power. So where does Flathead Electric get its electricity?

Katie: Yeah. So the vast majority of our power comes from the Bonneville Power Administration, which is the federal power marketing agency that was formed to market the power coming from federal projects. Most of those federal projects are the federal Columbia River Hydropower System, which is a series of 31 federal hydro projects all throughout the Columbia River Basin, including two that happen to live right in our service area, right? The one I drove by as I was coming up here, Hungry Horse Dam, is what most people are familiar with in our area, but we also serve-- our service area goes up to Libby Montana, which is where the Libby Dam is located. And both of those are federal hydro projects. So, yes, that power is generated by those dams and then a series throughout the rest of the Columbia River basin all the way out to the Pacific Ocean. So everywhere between here and here and there, Idaho, Washington, Oregon.

Daniel: So for the most part, most of the electricity used at least on the west side of Glacier National Park, it's coming from hydroelectric facilities.

Katie: Yes. Well, all the electricity, I mean, really almost all the electricity purchased from Flathead Electric specifically would be coming from those hydroelectric facilities. Yes.

Daniel: But that said, there are wires that all connect to a greater grid that's regionally greater and I suppose even nationally larger.

Katie: Yes. So we are we're part of-- from the transmission system perspective, we're part of what's called the Western Interconnect. And that's really... Most of the Western United States is all interconnected through a giant transmission system. And that allows us to balance the grid, which is obviously very important. You have to to keep the lights on. You have to have the supply of electricity and the demand for electricity have to match up exactly at any given minute to keep the grid in balance. And so having, you know, more of that interconnection helps us regionally do more of that.

Daniel: And on that larger grid than there are lots of generating facilities. There's coal plants and not just hydro, there's solar, there's all kinds of things, right? But locally we can say that pretty much all the electrons we're getting here are from hydroelectric.

Katie: Yeah, I would say I think it's about 85% of our power mix is, you know, those large hydro projects. We've also got, Bonneville also markets a nuclear project, which is about 10% of our portfolio. But overall, yes, Flathead Electric's power mix is 96% carbon free, which is it's just really great for our service area. We're very, very proud of that.

Daniel: That's cool.

Katie: Yeah, we have developed a few local generation projects. They're fairly small projects, but they're still just a great addition to our power mix and locally generated power, which is pretty exciting. So we've got two existing community solar projects and then one that we'll be breaking ground on early this summer. Actually, we're just in the final stages of selling the generation from that project. And then we've also got a landfill gas to energy. So it's methane, taking the methane gas that is produced at a landfill and turning that into electricity. And then we've also got partnership with Stoltza here for a biomass generator. We purchase the power that is created at that facility, and we've got a couple of partnerships for some small hydro projects within our service area as well. And then more and more we're seeing, you know, our members are also joining us as part of the of the generation mix in that they're generating some of their own power as well, not unlike the park up here with the with the solar panels and small hydro projects that exist here. [mellow beat begins to play]

Daniel: Yeah, we've got solar panels on this rooftop right here.

Katie: You do. [beat finishes playing, marking the transition]

Daniel: Well, we're lucky then, here at Glacier National Park because we're looking for electricity that comes without much or any greenhouse gas emissions. So we're really lucky that we have solar here, but we have that most of the electricity where we're getting is relatively carbon-free coming from hydroelectric systems.

Katie: Yeah. Yeah. We're very, very fortunate to have access to the federal hydro system, not only as, you know, hydropower, non-carbon generating resource, but it's also an extremely affordable and reliable, you know, most importantly, as we as, we start to look at significant resource adequacy concerns on our our grid as a whole, that reliability piece is really critical. And what makes it reliable is the ability to ramp it up and down instantaneously to meet the demand that's on the system, right? So we talked about that supply and demand having to be in constant balance and hydropower allows us to keep that in balance as well.

Daniel: So the other great thing about hydro is that it's like the gas- or the coal-fired power plants that are adjustable in that you can pretty easily adjust the amount of electricity you're you're creating and that it's creating electricity, whether it's dark out, whether it's winter or summer. There are real baseload source of electricity.

Katie: Yeah, it's an incredible resource. My favorite by far and, you know, completely renewable. Obviously, the water continues to go through the river and, and it rains and snows again, and it melts, and it-- and the whole system starts over. And yes, we can ramp it up. We can ramp it down to meet expected loads. So, I mean, really, it's kind of the original renewable. Yeah, that's what I like to refer to it as.

Daniel: So hydro is a really important part of the electric transition. It's really important. Part of our solution to climate change really is, you know, getting us a lot of baseload electricity that's relatively carbon free. That said, there are some downsides. We don't want to dam every river for a lot of reasons.

Katie: Right, yes.

Daniel: And that, you know, a lot of the good hydro spots are taken. They're established. It's not like we can just scale up hydro very easily anymore.

Katie: No, we're not going to be building any more large hydro projects. I mean, it's very difficult to site any generation project. But yes, I don't see us-- I don't see us doing that.

Daniel: Yeah. Because then as we're-- as Glacier, as the country, as the region is looking to get more and more of our electricity from sources that don't release greenhouse gases that warm the climate, we are going to need more electricity and less natural gas, less propane, that kind of thing. So there's only so much hydro we can build. So we have, there's some other resources like solar and wind. Let's compare that then to the landfill gas. What do you call that?

Katie: Yes. Landfill methane gas to energy plant.

Daniel: How does that one work?

Katie: So in that case, we are-- we've actually got wells drilled at the landfill. So they're like vertical and horizontal pipes that run through the the trash itself, because methane gas is is generated by all of our garbage. Right. And that's what typically what gets flared off at a landfill. That's where you see the flares. They're burning off that methane because you don't want to put methane straight, methane into the atmosphere. Right.

Daniel: So as the garbage, as the-- as our trash...

Katie: Decomposes.

Daniel: It releases methane, which is a powerful greenhouse gas. Either way, whether you burn it off or just release it, you are releasing greenhouse gases. Yeah. But the idea is you might as well, if you're releasing it, you might as well get some electricity from it.

Katie: So you're actually able to extract that gas out of the landfill through the the piping system, vacuum it out and run it through. Cleaning process and then through a very large generator that's right there on the facility that's interconnected into our grid. And we can produce electricity literally from our trash, which is pretty amazing.

Daniel: Yeah, that's interesting. Lots of the Flathead Electric Co-op members have solar panels on the roof, including us, including in this building. That's great. What are the downsides to that? I mean, the upside is that it creates electricity for free from the sun with pretty much no greenhouse gases. Yeah, it's good for the climate, but we maybe live in a climate, you know, that's it's like it's very cloudy.

Katie: You're looking outside at the cloudy, cloudy, rainy day, right? [laughing].

Daniel: Yeah.

Katie: I the challenge with with solar and wind is really in its intermittency.

Daniel: Meaning it it's not happening all the time. It's not always sunny.

Katie: Yeah. And so we're able to produce a lot of electricity actually. You know, in some cases when you look to the California market, for instance, they're producing way too much, right? So that creates a whole another challenge. They're producing way too much solar when they don't don't need it. But the difficulty, you know, especially when you look at at our area, is that when we need power most to meet like that instantaneous load at peak load, typically there is almost no solar energy being produced and the wind is typically not blowing in those cases either.

Daniel: So is that because our peak loads are like at dawn and dusk when it's not as bright out?

Katie: Exactly. Or they're happening-- you know, we're a winter peaking facility or winter peaking utility, which means that our peak load happens in the winter months. And those-- our daylight hours are short, right?

Daniel: Yeah.

Katie: So almost all of our winter peaks happen in the dark. You know, from a utility planning standpoint, what we're concerned about are only really the peaks. It really isn't that we don't have enough electricity, we don't have an electricity shortage -- we have an electricity shortage during our peaks. And it's not just a shortage of power. It's also a shortage of the transmission that we need to get power from one place to another. Our system's historical peak load that we've ever hit just happened in January during that extraordinarily cold snap, right? Mid January. None of us are going to forget that one.[chuckles] And we hit, you know, what, -40?

Daniel: It was cold.

Katie: It was cold! And we I mean, our system was really it was pushed to the brink. And not just, you know, our system, but regionally. We were we were pushed to the brink of what we have to meet those peaks from a transmission and generation standpoint. And that's pretty scary as we start talking about, you know, resources going away that are helping us meet those peak demands and replacing those resources with something that wasn't generating any power when we needed it. Right then, there was no wind and no solar being generated when we hit that peak.

Daniel: So we're in kind of a bind with climate change, in that globally, there's a tremendous need to reduce our emissions that come from generating electricity through gas and coal power plants. But on the other hand, global warming is not significant enough in Montana that we don't still have cold snaps, that it's not still dark and cold in the winter. So we still need electricity when...

Katie: We do [laughs]. We do. It's it is a challenge. And, you know, I think ultimately most of us all want the same thing. Right? But the how we get there is the challenge. And from a utility planning perspective, it's definitely a concerning time as we look at what this transition is going to look like and not only from a again, a reliability perspective, but how do we keep electric rates affordable with the amount of generating resources and transmission infrastructure that needs to be built to support the load growth expected in our region? I -- it keeps me up at night.

Daniel: So one of the challenges you're describing is that we are phasing out things like coal and natural gas because.

Katie: Yes, those "always on" resources, right?

Daniel: Yeah, those have a lot of greenhouse gas emissions associated with them, a lot of air pollution associated with them. So in many ways this is a good transition to be making. But the problem is at the same time we're increasing the amount of electricity we need.

Katie: Yes. So that's that's a challenge.

Daniel: That's a challenge.

Katie: No matter how you look at it. That's a challenge that we have to overcome. Right?

Daniel: And that we're increasing the need, partly because we're building data centers, we're building like, server farms, but also just population growth is increasing.

Katie: Yeah.

Daniel: People are plugging more things in. On top of that, on sort of the user end, there is an electrification transition happening, where people are electrifying their weed eaters and lawnmowers.

Katie: Yep.

Daniel: They're electrifying their cars. All of these have really positive effects as well. Like there's a lot of air pollution and greenhouse gases associated with those tools.

Katie: Right.

Daniel: Those small two stroke engines generate a lot of greenhouse gas emissions. They generate a lot of air pollution. It's great to electrify them. Plus they're quieter and more efficient.

Katie: A lot of people like them a lot better. Right?

Daniel: Yeah. But that increases the need for more electricity on the grid.

Katie: You've got it.

Daniel: Another thing then, I guess, is locally, solar can't fill in all the gaps. Wind can't fill in all the gaps. We've got hydro. That's great. But we can't fill in all the gaps with other renewables. If we zoom out and look at a bigger region, you know, our region or nationally, you could imagine that we could get solar electricity from Arizona when we're having a cold snap here in Montana. But it's not that simple, right?

Katie: It's not that simple.

Daniel: What's the problem there?

Katie: So the transmission system itself needs significant infrastructure additions to be able to facilitate that.

Daniel: Basically, they're the wires that connect us, that connect Montana to the solar panels in Southern California -- those wires don't exist to a good enough degree to to get us out of this.

Katie: Right. And who pays for that infrastructure need, you know, the billions and billions of dollars of infrastructure that would be needed to make something like that happen. So, you know, that that in and of itself is a massive challenge. And we really, you know, can't possibly overstate that, from not only the cost challenge associated with it, but also just the permitting and, I mean the same way that it's very, very challenging to site generation, it's that much more challenging to site massive transmission lines. Nobody, you know, everybody wants to have power, but nobody wants to look at transmission lines.

Daniel: Of course.

Katie: And so getting those things sited and built, it's massively challenging. There are so many, so many roadblocks. And even I mean, even to get renewable generation built, there are massive, massive roadblocks. Another challenge with wind and solar is just is the land mass challenge, you know, because really today, to accommodate for the intermittency of those resources, even pairing them with batteries, you need about five to-- five to one in terms of the generating capacity to replace a baseload generation resource.

Daniel: So it's this transition in theory, totally works. You know, we have sun shine-- always shining somewhere. We've got wind always blowing somewhere. Plus with our hydro, you know, kind of pulling us along. The problem is that to connect all of this and scale it up costs a lot of money. It takes a lot of work. And paying for that is not easy.

Katie: Paying for that is not easy. Building it in the first place is not easy. Talking about the buildout of, you know, the wind generation, the solar generation, the batteries from a natural resources and rare earth minerals standpoint is challenging. I think we're moving in some positive directions, but it's a much, much larger transition than I think than than we hope, right?

Daniel: If someone's been listening to the other conversations that I've been having in the series, like the consequences of climate change are extraordinary and that on a global scale, the math pencils out pretty well, that it's worth paying for this transition. But those costs are not-- they're not being billed evenly.

Katie: Right. Globally, certainly. Right.

Daniel: Yeah. So the the cost of getting our electricity over the past century and a half from coal and gas has been that it's heated our climate by over a degree Celsius already. It's melting the Park's glaciers. It's doubling the amount of wildfire we're seeing in the past couple of decades already. And all of those impacts are going to continue to get worse. Not to mention all the air pollution that comes from just the burning of those fossil fuels. So it's a critical transition to be making. But it's that doesn't mean it's easy.

Katie: Far from.

Daniel: And then on top of that, some of the impacts of climate change are actually making some of this transition even harder, like wildfire. How is that impacting electric transmission, for example?

Katie: Right. Yes. Speaking of things that keep us up at night, right? I mean, obviously, our region has has seen a lot more wildfire. And it's really, really difficult keeping poles and wires safe and and also not having any of of our system cause wildfire.

Daniel: That is basically that since it's getting hotter and drier, the risk of lighting-- or accidentally starting...

Katie: Of igniting...

Daniel: A wildfire from a power line... That's a real serious risk.

Katie: Yeah, absolutely.

Daniel: Another one could be climate change-exacerbated drought or, you know, if we have really low snowpack, we're a little low this year if we have--

Katie: We're quite low this year.

Daniel: Yeah. So that matters for electricity generation when we're so dependent on hydro.

Katie: It does. Yeah. That has certainly has an impact on the hydro system. You know, we've been very fortunate to have our hydro system have excellent years. But, you know, certainly.

Daniel: This is something you're watching.

Katie: Certainly something we're watching. You know, the other thing that I would mention is just extreme weather in general and the strain that it can create on the grid. So again, we're winter peaking. So we saw some of our coldest temperatures we've ever seen just this past winter. And that was, you know, that produced our peak loads in our area. But in other parts of the region where they're summer peaking, and maybe seeing some more extreme temperatures on the warmer side, you know, that that creates, you know, high loads as well that need to be met, which produces grid strain. Right? The higher the load, the higher the peak demand that needs to be met, the more potential strain on the grid. So just extreme weather in both directions, hot or cold has a grid impact. And, of course, extreme weather events like storms, you know, wind, flooding.

Daniel: Yeah.

Katie: All of which we've seen we just dealt with in our service area with flooding, here in the last couple of years as well. That took out a whole bunch of our system. So, yes, extreme weather in general is a threat to us, to the grid.

Daniel: Yeah. Maybe just to reiterate one of these points, it's frustrating that climate change is obviously increasing the temperatures in the winter in this area and all over the place. It's-- it's the winters are getting on average warmer and so are the summers. The summers are getting on average hotter. But we're not struggling to generate the electricity so much with the average, we're struggling to generate electricity...

Katie: With the peak.

Daniel: With the peaks.

Katie: Yes.

Daniel: And climate change is not eliminating cold snaps in the winter. So we still need-- we still have high peak demands for electricity during those cold snaps in the winter.

Katie: Absolutely. We are in an extraordinarily challenging time. And, you know, I'm a-- I'm an optimist and I think my role in the utility has also led me to be a realist about some of the energy crisis that we are facing at this time. But I also, as an optimist, I always look for opportunity in these challenges.

Daniel: Do you think you get some of your optimism from the fact knowing that Flathead Electric Co-op was created in a moment of great challenge and transition?

Katie: You know, almost 100 years ago, we were-- we were in a transition. Right, that felt daunting. And that we banded together and formed co-ops.

Daniel: A century or more ago when the Rural Electrification Act was passed. That was a time of great transition, too.

Katie: Yeah.

Daniel: Basically, no one in this area had electricity. There wasn't a grid. So we've overcome big infrastructural transitions like this before.

Katie: We have. Yes. Our predecessors faced significant challenges in electrifying all of rural America. And I think, you know, that that movement really, you know, transformed our our nation and laid a groundwork for, you know, a lot of the prosperity that we enjoy today. And we are definitely sitting at the at the cusp of another of another challenging transition and a time that has potential to be, to be very transformative. Power and electricity, while it was, in the rural electrification times, it was very, very nice to have. Now it's, it's essential. It's an essential part of all of our lives. So we we have to find solutions to keep the lights on. You know, the closest that we've come in our region to not being able to keep the lights on -- and many other regions have already have already experienced rolling blackouts, right? That's what happens when you when you don't have the grid in balance. You either take a take a blackout, right, or you do rolling blackouts across an interconnected grid to balance loads. But the closest that we've come to not being able to to meet those reliability needs is during extreme weather events. And particularly when there is, like, a generating system down, right? So there was a weather event in 2021 where one of the main federal hydro systems was having some maintenance issues. And during that event, you know, we came very, very close to not being able to meet peak demands. We were pushed to the brink again, just here in this winter event that was, you know, a regional cold snap. We were pushing our our grid right up close to the to the edge. We're sitting here talking about it and everyone's like, "yeah, but it's fine. Like, it's been fine." And we're sweating [laughing] as the utility, because we've been working really hard to make sure it's fine. And I don't think we understand how close that we that we have come or could come in the case of an extreme weather event or a generation system going down or a transmission system going down or...

Daniel: You're standing next to a cliff that you're looking at carefully. And most people are like, "what cliff?"

Katie: Right. Exactly. Yes. And then in-- we're also looking at growth forecasts is in the, in the northwest the latest snapshots on the load and demand -- that's the growth that's being forecast -- is between 2024 and 2033. So, you know, more or less the next ten years or less. Is like an eight-- over 18% annual energy growth and a 15% demand growth. And those numbers are huge. Unprecedented. We haven't met growth numbers like that before.

Daniel: You're describing a gap between the amount of electricity needed at peak times and the amount of electricity generated at peak times.

Katie: And transmission.

Daniel: Yeah. So it seems like you could try and solve that problem, overcome that challenge from two different directions. You could try and generate more electricity during peak times by building more solar or whatever. Or you could also try and solve that problem by reducing the peaks, getting people to use less electricity during the peaks, get it-- or getting them to use less electricity overall or less electricity at peak times and use it at different times. I suppose you're trying all of these things.

Katie: Great point. Yes, we-- and we are trying all these things. In fact, in fact, Flathead Electric was just awarded a federal grant. It's called the CIDER Grant. And we're one of five co-ops in the nation who is in this national research study on how distribution co-ops can develop distributed energy programs to work with their-- work closely with their members to control loads during peak times, or incentivize their members to control loads during peak times to to help reduce that grid strain and hopefully reduce the amount of new generation transmission that needs to be built, right. So, you know, right now we are in the midst of an engineering study to look at which programs might work in our area. One of those programs might be working with people who have smart thermostats in their homes to reduce the, you know, the temperature settings by a couple of degrees if we're expecting a peak load event in the summer. Which brings down down our loads, brings on energy costs for everyone. Or in the winter, you know, as the case may be here. Another program that the co-op has has actually offered in the past is a similar program that reduces your water heating load during peak times, which, you know, is good from the standpoint that, of course, it reduces our system load, but it also reduces your own personal load at your home, so it reduces your monthly energy costs and people-- electricity costs, and people really like that.

Daniel: Yeah.

Katie: So it's kind of a win win some of these programs, right? And that's what we're starting to see more of on that, you know, that collaboration side is, yes, regionally collaborating, but also the utilities collaborating more with with their members, as we like to say, as, you know, more grid partners.

Daniel: You're describing-- to me, it sounds like a lot of different ways of making the grid and the way we use electricity... making it smarter,.

Katie: Smarter and more flexible.

Daniel: This is something that utilities, I'm sure, have done for decades or the past century, is just charge more during peak times to try and get people to use less and spread their usage out more.

Katie: Interestingly, yes and no.

Daniel: Hm.

Katie: I think Flathead Electric was probably one of the earlier utilities -- not that there weren't others out there that did that -- we we have historically charged more as you used more energy, right. So this is again, this is that difference between our overall energy, so overall kilowatt hours that you utilize in a month, versus what your peak load at your house was, right. So that demand. And historically we've charged more as you've used more energy as an incentive to for you to not use as much energy. But what we've started doing is actually less emphasis on that piece and more emphasis on what we're, what is called a demand charge, which is based on your your peak demand at your own house. What was your highest load that you hit during our peak hours when where we know when we're strained and we're paying more for power? You know, what was your contribution to that load? And then charging for that accordingly to try to help reduce those peaks. Because again, not-- you know, we're not facing the, the shortage of overall electricity. We're really right now, facing that shortage during those peaks. Which is why, you know, us as the utility or the co-op, you know, we pay more during our our system peaks. And so that really mirrors the way that we're paying for power, to charge our members that way. And it incentivizes them to, you know, make choices that are good for the overall grid as well. But what these these other programs that we're talking about do is add a layer to that, you know, that foundational rate design concept that hopefully makes it more meaningful or more achievable for them to take part in those programs and actually reduce their loads.

Daniel: It's an interesting way to think about it that you're so concerned with peak loads rather than just average loads that your payment structure is actually designed for, that you're able to say like, it's not really about how much electricity you use overall, it's more about when you use it that we're concerned with.

Katie: Right. Yes. Which goes right back into that generation conversation, right. The really-- the generation we're concerned about is the generation that can happen during our peaks. That's when we-- that's when we need it. That's when it costs everyone more for us to buy it, and that's when we need it.

Daniel: If someone wants to pay a little bit less for their electricity, they should use their electric clothes dryer in the middle of the day or the middle of the night. Not use it during those peak load hours.

Katie: Depending on how their utilities rates are structured.

Daniel: Yeah.

Katie: If they're a Flathead Electric--Electric member. Yes. [laughs]

Daniel: And in the future, or even now, technologies that automate that will be really helpful in reducing peak loads.

Katie: Yes.

Daniel: Basically smart thermostats or just a dryer, clothes dryer, that's smart enough to know to run when there's less demand on the system.

Katie: Yeah. And what most people now can really relate to is their dishwasher. Like that's the easy one, right? To me, you know, I'm a-- I'm a mom. I've got two young kids. I've got a full time job. It's really difficult for me to not do laundry when I need to do laundry at this point. But my dishwasher, that's an easy one because I can just set it to run four hours later. So I'm not hitting those peaks.

Daniel: As long as they're clean when you get home...

Katie: Yeah, as long as they're clean when I wake up, then I'm good.

Daniel: What you're looking at, then it's just like, okay, well, how do we actually do that?

Katie: Right? Yeah, it sounds great. And it is. But, but figuring out...

Daniel: Is it something that the utility does? Is it something that the homeowner does? Is it something that the car does, or all three together?

Katie: Like, there are all those options. Yeah. And then even from the utility perspective, is it something that like a regional entity does instead so that there's more of a regional spread, right? So Flathead Electric is a member of PNGC, which is a generation and transmission cooperative that has 18 other public power members throughout the Pacific Northwest. So they have more of a regional look at the grid. So does it make sense to do, you know, some of this load control at the regional perspective, or does it make sense for us as a utility to do it to help more control our distribution grid? So there's all of these questions and all of these considerations and factors that go into it. And then you get down to that more granular piece of, okay but how do we actually do it?

Daniel: Yeah.

Katie: What devices are we actually helping a member manage? How are we actually managing those devices? We're looking also at water heaters, we're looking also at generators, we're looking at battery energy storage systems and net metered systems. And, you know, there are all sorts of potential programs that we could be looking at.

Daniel: And it's kind of an exciting area because it's all unknown. But one or a combination of these things will work. And the solution's there -- like it's, it's not as overwhelming as some of these other challenges we're talking about.

Katie: Right.

Daniel: That's cool.

Daniel: Katie, maybe you can talk to us about kind of-- your predictions. The electrification of this region that started in the 1930s... it took decades. And now it's been growing into what it is over the past century. Now we're in the 2020s. What do you see for the rest of this century for electricity in this region?

Katie: Diversification. For sure. Right? You know, as a utility, we're looking at where we can partner to build new generation resources, where we can partner to build transmission and distribution infrastructure that's going to be needed to meet our peaks. We are partnering more closely with members on what's called distributed energy resources. Right. And that's that would include things like, like solar panels that are on this building. But any resource that's distributed outside of the main grid, right, the main point of generation transmission to distribution. So smaller generation projects, you know, that we're seeing more and more of those, you know, those smaller local gen projects. And we're seeing more and more and more of our members become grid partners with us. And I don't really see a future where we don't have increased energy costs, unfortunately. And, you know, I think we'll see, you know, a grid that that hopefully becomes smarter and more able to incorporate, you know, more of those resources because we're going to have to I think we are going to need an all of the above approach to just to meet the load growth, right. Even if we weren't trying to replace a whole bunch of generation that that's set to retire.

Daniel: You're describing a future that's more collaborative that-- where the "public" part of public power is, is more important. What should the average person listening to this-- what would you encourage them to do to get more involved?

Katie: You know, I would encourage them to maybe go on a little bit of an educational journey. And at least have a better understanding of what happens when they flip the switch.

Daniel: Basically, you're encouraging people to find out where their electricity is coming from.

Katie: Yes. I think a lot of people in our area don't understand that they're served by an electric co-op or what that means or that, you know, their their heating is coming from natural gas. That's that's a different utility. And that their light switches and other appliances are being powered by electricity or that if they're outside of, you know, the city limits, maybe they are all electrically heated. And I don't think that... that mostly the general public has a great understanding of of that. And so I think that's a really, really good place to start is is kind of that like grid 101, right. That's where I would start, is just making sure that you have an understanding of what's happening in your own home and your own business. And where it's, you know, where it's ultimately coming from. And then I think you can start to kind of grasp that bigger picture.

Daniel: Yeah, I like that you said, you know, start your education journey. Find out what happens when you flip the switch. And I can imagine a lot of benefit from people saying, okay, so I realize now my stove is natural gas.

Katie: Yep.

Daniel: It's wearing out. I need to upgrade it. Am I going to switch to electricity? There's a lot of climate and air pollution benefits to that. But maybe I should be thinking about efficiency. Maybe I should be thinking about how I'm powering that, you know, with a battery when the power goes out. Or with solar panels on my roof, or just thinking through some of these transitions from fossil fuels to electricity that are happening inside the home.

Katie: Yeah. The reality is that you have more energy choices than ever, right. And our website's a great place to start. And even if you're not a member of Flathead Electric, you're welcome to use those resources.

Daniel: So find out what electric co-op you might be part of, but also go check out Flathead Electric if you need help.

Katie: Yeah, exactly. We try to be very careful to not be alarmist, but just be realistic about the challenges that that we're facing in hopes that our members will be better educated, that they will be better informed, and that they will take a little bit more active role in their in their co-op, in their energy future. And I think that that is that's one of the benefits of of the cooperative business model is that we are very focused in that way.

Daniel: Yeah. That for better or worse, we're living through an era of big change. [chimey music begins to play]

Katie: Yes.

Daniel: And it's going to take all of us getting involved and paying attention to get through that. [beat joins in]

Katie: Yeah, exactly.

Daniel: Well, thanks so much for talking with us today on Headwaters.

Katie: Sure. Thank you very much for having us. [song continues to play under the credits]

Peri: Headwaters is funded by donations to the Glacier National Park Conservancy. As an organization dedicated to supporting the park, the Conservancy funds a lot of sustainability initiatives. From solar panels on park buildings to storytelling projects like this one, the Conservancy is doing critical work to prevent the worst impacts of climate change. You can learn more about what they do and about how to get involved at glacier.org. The Headwaters team includes Daniel Lombardi, Michael Faist, Gaby Eseverri, Madeline Vinh, Sophia Britto, and me, Peri Sasnett. That said, Headwaters wouldn't exist without friends like Lacy Kowalski, Grace Kinzler, Melissa Sladek, Kristen Friesen and so many others. Our music is made fresh by Frank Waln, and the show's cover art was created by Stella Nall. Check out Frank and Stella's work with the links in the show notes. I recommend following both of them on Instagram. Besides sharing this episode with a friend who might appreciate it, you can support us by leaving us a review in your podcast app. Thanks for listening! [music resolves and fades out]

A lively debate between Michael Faist and Peri Sasnett about the best activities in Glacier, moderated by Sophia Britto. If you're planning a visit to the park, this episode might give you some ideas!

Glacier Conservancy: glacier.org Frank Waln music: instagram.com/frankwaln Stella Nall art: instagram.com/stella.nall Glacier National Park: nps.gov/glac

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TRANSCRIPT:

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Lacy Kowalski: Headwaters is brought to you by the Glacier National Park Conservancy.

Sophia Britto: Our purpose is to tell unexpected stories about how Glacier is connected to everything else. But today's bonus episode will be a little different. Instead of telling a story, I'm hosting a debate between Michael and Peri about the best activities to do in Glacier.

Michael Faist: Oof. [Gameshow music starts, then fades to background]

Sophia: Hi, I'm Sophia, you're listening to. Headwaters, a podcast from Glacier National Park.

Peri Sasnett: I'm Peri.

Michael: I'm Michael.

Sophia: Here in my hands, I have a ranger hat full of little pieces of paper with different activities you could do in Glacier National Park.

Michael: Okay.

Sophia: I will pull one of these pieces of paper, and on it will be an activity. And whoever speaks first, that's their stance. And the other person has to argue the opposite.

Peri: Oh...okay.

Michael: Here we go.

Peri: Michael and I can get in a fight about anything.

Michael: That's that's the easy part. It's winning the fight... that's the hard part.

Peri: I'm ready.

Sophia: So let's pull the first topic and get started.

Michael: [Paper rusting sounds] Okay. Camping. [Electronic selection sound] Well, I love camping. That's my stance. If you come to a national park, odds are you're here to kind of disconnect from normal life. Unplug, so to speak. Sounds corny, [Peri laughs] but how often do you get to wake up with the sunrise, go to sleep at the sunset. Show off your ability, or lack thereof, to build a campfire. Have s'mores. It's just the perfect national park experience.

Peri: Well, I hate camping. There are way too many bugs. Glacier can be very mosquito at certain times of year. Also, you say "great, you get to see the sunsets and wake up with the sunrise!" In Glacier, in the summer, that is too late and too early. You're not getting enough sleep and fundamentally you're paying someone to sleep on the ground. Hard pass. [Michael laughs]

Sophia: I would give that one to Michael. I feel like bug spray is a thing. [Peri and Michael laugh] If I'm in my tent, I'm relatively safe from the bugs. I'm going to enjoy the great outdoors occasionally. I don't have to do it all the time.

Michael: Okay.

Peri: [Paper rusting sounds] All right. Floating slash tubing. [Electronic selection sound] Love it. Floating the stretch of Lower McDonald Creek from Apgar to West Glacier is right outside my house. And really easy to do after work. And I love that I get to see a part of the park that's right by my house, but from a totally different perspective than I would see it otherwise. Also, great birds.

Michael: I hate floating and tubing because it requires you to have two different vehicles. You've got to put one in where you start, and you have to park one where you get out and you have to spend all that time, waste all that time, I would say, shuttling back and forth. Whereas hiking, you can start and end at the same place, no problem there. Loop hikes, there are not loop rivers. Anti floating. [Peri laughs] You're just baking in the sun the whole time. Sophia: Personally, I didn't grow up near rivers, so I am loving them here. So, I'm sorry Michael I have to side with Peri floating and tubing. That's pretty fun.

Peri: Yes.

Michael: This is too bad. All right... What's next. [Paper rusting sounds] Stargazing. [Electronic selection sound] Well, I love stargazing, and here's why: I don't know the names of almost any constellations, [Peri laughs] and that doesn't matter. I can pick out the Big Dipper, the Little Dipper. Beyond that, it's just like, Earth's screensaver. You could stare at it. It's mesmerizing. It's special to look for comments. It's... I mean, what's better than staring up at the night sky?

Peri: Okay. Night skies. Thumbs up. Stargazing. Thumbs down. You have to stay up. Way too late. Here in Glacier. In the summer. It's not even fully dark till well after midnight. There's too much to be doing during the day. We don't have time to be stargazing at night. It's my bedtime.

Michael: During the daytime that she's so excited about. It's been like, 95 degrees. Nighttime. Cool 70s. Beautiful skies. And also, coffee exists, so.

Sophia: I'm siding with Michael here. Yeah. Love the stars here. You can see the Milky Way in Glacier National Park, which is pretty special. Yeah.

Michael: I'm glad I drew first on that one.

Peri: [Paper rusting sounds] Okay. Fishing. [Electronic selection sound] I don't have a lot to say about fishing. Those who've listened to Season Two will recall that the last time I went fishing, I was six and an alligator ate my bobber. [Michael laughs] So it's just adding work to another activity I'd rather be doing. Like I'm floating down the river on a boat? I just want to enjoy that. It feels like a lot of work to be sitting there, waving a fishing rod around. Or if I'm like, fly fishing, standing in the shallows. Like, I could just be swimming, or eating, or picnicking, you know? I don't need it.

Michael: Well, I love fishing. It is one of the most meditative ways to gain a deep understanding of an ecosystem in Glacier. The park only encourages you to catch or touch one type of animal in the park, and it's fish. [Peri laughs] You're allowed to catch them. There are some that you aren't, but it's just such a unique experience in the park to be able to get to know the aquatic wildlife and have an excuse to just go stand in a river for two hours.

Peri: Michael, how many times have you been fishing in Glacier?

Michael: Twice. [Peri and Sophia laugh]

Sophia: Maybe I need to become a fish girl. I've never been fishing before, which is surprising for being from Texas. But your arguments pretty convincing. Michael. I know you can find out more information about fishing regulations on our website, so if anybody else is interested in hopping on the fish train, check it out.

Michael: Fish train!

Peri: No. [Michael and Sophia laugh}

Michael: [Paper rusting sounds] Driving Going-to-the-Sun Road. [Electronic selection sound] Big fan. Love it. I mean, it's like the ultimate experience here, it's the experience that put Glacier on the map for people to come visit. It's where I would say 90% of the pictures of the park come from, is from driving Going-to-the-Sun, maybe 75.

Peri: Mmm...

And that is because you get to witness three different distinct ecosystems in one two-hour drive. You get to have incredible wildlife sightings from the safety of your vehicle, from bears, to bighorn sheep, mountain goats. You get to drive to over 6600ft. What's not to love?

Peri: Here's what's not to love: driving. What if you take a shuttle so you don't have to drive Going-to-the-Sun Road? You can see all those things, but you can spend way more time actually looking at them. Instead of having to spend all that thought and energy looking at the road, avoiding other cars and said, bighorn sheep and mountain goats. And if you just sit on a shuttle, and let someone else do the driving, you can appreciate the scenery. Its type one fun. There you go.

Sophia: Honestly, the shuttle sounds pretty nice to me. Or being a passenger, I would say. Yeah, I'm siding with Peri on this. [Peri laughs].

Michael: Dang it!

Peri: All right. [Paper rusting sounds] One more... Birding! [Electronic selection sound] I love birding. I love trying to figure out who they are, what they look like, who's singing and... you may not get to see a grizzly bear when you come here. I'm sure you won't see a mountain lion. I'm. A few of you might... But I never have. But almost everywhere you go in Glacier, you'll find birds. You can come at any time of year and see birds. And especially if you come in the spring. They're constantly singing and calling and just making this place richer and more beautiful.

Michael: Well, here's my hot take on birding. [Peri laughs] I love birds. I mean, they are the soundtrack to our mental image of nature itself. But as you said, they are everywhere. I could see birds where I grew up in Ohio, and I can ID them and have a very similar experience. If I wanted to see a grizzly bear, I'd have to go to the zoo. So, birding in Glacier? It's fun to hear birds as you go out and hike, but it's not an activity in its own right. Birds are the background to experiences you could only have here, and that people are coming from across the country to have because they can't have it at home. So that's that's my hot take on birding.

Peri: I'm never taking you birding again. [Michael and Sophia laugh]

Sophia: Honestly, Peri, your passion for birding speaks to me. There's hundreds of birds you could see here, and that's a very special experience. So, I have to side with Peri here, Michael.

Michael: Okay. I disagree, but it has been decided. [Peri laughs]

Peri: It's okay. I won... you... just accept it. [Gameshow music starts, then fades into background] I feel like we covered a lot, but there are so many other activities that we didn't talk about.

Michael: What's another activity?

Peri: I would say berry picking.

Michael: Yeah.

Peri: I love picking huckleberries.

Michael: Classic.

Peri: It's an iconic part of a Glacier summer... just wouldn't be the same without it.

Michael: If you are trying to plan a trip to Glacier and interested in what sort of activities you can find here, check out our website at nps.gov/GLAC and it can help you plan a great trip.

Sophia: We're hard at work on the next season of Headwaters. Stay tuned for bonus content like this and more episodes about your favorite national park.

Peri: Headwaters is made possible with support from our nonprofit partner at the Glacier National Park Conservancy. We are so grateful for all that they do for us. Check them out at Glacier.org. And if you have a moment to leave us a review and your podcast app, that helps us so much. Thanks for listening.

Michael: You know, one activity we missed?

Peri: Hm?

Michael: Podcasting. [Peri laughs] I mean, there are more activities here than we could cut up and put in a ranger hat. I like them all.

Peri: Me too. Despite everything that we just said.

A conversation with Jennifer Gibson, who coordinates post-wildfire response for the National Park Service. This episode was recorded in May 2024.

Headwaters is created by Daniel Lombardi, Gaby Eseverri, Peri Sasnett, and Madeline Vinh.

Glacier Conservancy: glacier.org/headwaters Frank Waln music: www.instagram.com/frankwaln/ Stella Nall art: www.instagram.com/stella.nall/

Climate change in Glacier: www.nps.gov/glac/learn/nature/climate-change.htm Whiskeytown National Recreation Area: www.nps.gov/whis

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TRANSCRIPT:

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Lacy Kowalski: Headwaters is brought to you by the Glacier National Park Conservancy.

Peri Sasnett: This is Headwaters, a show about how Glacier National Park is connected to everything else. My name is Peri, and I find the ecology and politics of wildfire endlessly interesting. However, I also recognize that wildfire can be challenging and scary to live with, and at times even deadly. And all of this is made worse by a warmer climate. For this episode, my co-host Daniel interviewed Jennifer Gibson in the spring of 2024. She's the post-wildfire coordinator for the National Park Service. She tells a gripping, emotional, and frankly stressful story about when the park unit she was working at burned almost entirely in a matter of days during the 2018 Carr fire. You probably remember hearing about that fire on the news, and just for clarity, it spelled C-A-R-R, not like a car that you drive. That fire eventually burned 230,000 acres and killed eight people. [mellow beat begins to play] And this story is not as unique as you might think. In 2022, 95% of Sunset Crater National Monument burned. That same summer, a wildfire burned over 95% of Bent's Old Fort National Historic Site. A year later, three national parks in the famously wet Pacific Northwest all had their largest fires on record: Olympic, North Cascades and Redwood. So this conversation is about one person surviving a deadly wildfire. But it's also about how the National Park Service is surviving in a new reality of wildfire, accelerated by climate change. [beat plays for a few seconds and resolves, marking a transition into the interview]

Daniel Lombardi: Jennifer Gibson, welcome to Headwaters. Thanks for coming on. Maybe start with just telling us what's your job.

Jennifer Gibson: Hi. Thanks for having me. My job now is the National Park Service's post-wildfire programs coordinator. So I'm based out of the National Interagency Fire Center. My job now is to assist and help parks in recovering from wildfire. And that's essentially overseeing the Burned Area Emergency Response program.

Daniel: What did-- what was your title during the Carr Fire at Whiskeytown National Recreation Area?

Jennifer: The Chief of Resources and Interpretation.

Daniel: We're talking specifically about the Carr Fire in Northern California. But this story, as dramatic and shocking as it is, it could very easily happen pretty much anywhere in the American West. Of course, it could happen here in Glacier National Park. Obviously, we have big wildfires here, but the kind of unprecedented, fast moving and property and life threatening wildfire that you're describing, there's no reason that couldn't happen here in Glacier.

Jennifer: Yeah, it can happen in Glacier. It can happen in North Cascades. You know, it could be another Whiskeytown or, some parks are burning down, like 70% of Lassen Volcanic National Park burned in the Dixie Fire, 80% of Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation burned in the Woolsey Fire. Look at Lava Beds. So 70% of Lava Beds burned in 2020, the remaining 30% burned in 2021.

Daniel: And we're not necessarily pinpointing any one of these fires and saying this is, this burned the way that it did because of climate change. But larger, more frequent, more intense wildfires is exactly what we expect in a hotter climate that we now have.

Jennifer: Yeah, Whiskeytown had the hottest days on record and the lowest fuel moisture for 1000 hour fuels on record. It's not just one thing. When it comes down to it, it's this... Is it climate change or is it everything coming into an alignment with climate change as a contributing factor? And that could be a really dangerous combination, because I really don't think I don't think science is keeping up with the changing environment. I don't think our management and policy is keeping up with the changing environment. I feel like a bunch of us resource staff or park staff, all of us together, interpreters, whomever, facility managers, we're all standing here now in this age, 2024, and we're watching our parks rapidly change around us. Like, I think this cohort that we have now working in national parks, we are definitely challenged with this whole new unexpected thing called climate change. And with that's intermixed with all these other factors. I feel like we're witnessing the change in our national parks.

Daniel: Yeah. The entering, into a, not a new reality, but a, an unstable and ever-shifting reality. [beat plays to mark a transition] So Whiskeytown has kind of a funny name. What-- what is Whiskeytown, really simply? It's, it's a national recreation area, part of the Park Service.

Jennifer: It is. It's a unit of the National Park Service. It follows the mission of the National Park Service. It is a recreation area, so it's really like the, it's like Golden Gate National Recreation Area, Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area. It's really about recreation for the local visitors.

Daniel: And living there for 20 years, it probably became like a pretty important place to you to.

Jennifer: Yeah, I lived, one mile from the park boundary, so I had a really short commute. So my weekends, if I wanted to get a hike in, if I wanted to go botanizing, kayaking, I always went up to the park. The whole community loved Whiskeytown.

Daniel: For someone who doesn't-- isn't familiar with Whiskeytown, one of the key features is a large dam and a reservoir, a huge lake right in the middle of the park unit. There's a lot of urban areas right next to the the park unit, and it's all a pretty mountainous, forested area.

Jennifer: It is extremely diverse. It goes from 600ft in elevation, up to 6200ft in a really short distance. So it's really steep. So it goes from oak woodlands and grass up to subalpine fir, like Red Fir forest and montane chaparral. It has old growth forests and spotted owls in the higher elevations, but in the lower elevations it has chaparral and chamise and things that you would see at Santa Monica mountains. So that's one of the reasons why I love that park so much, because it was so incredibly diverse.

Daniel: It's basically like all of California smushed into one park unit.

Jennifer: Yeah, totally. And it was great. Like really crazy biotic assemblages living together in the same location, like Pacific giant salamanders and whiptail lizards, like something from a, Pacific Northwest meets the desert, you know, in the same campground. So it's, it's a really cool place, but it has waterfalls, lots of biking trails, lots of hiking trails, kayaking. It's-- it's a really nice place.

Daniel: So we're going to talk about what happened at Whiskeytown in 2018, which was a big wildfire. Just big picture, this was one of the larger fires in California history. What's wild is it's moved down a lot of notches on that records list since then. But this happened in 2018 and it burned-- this is in Northern California around the town of Redding. When did the Carr Fire start for you?

Jennifer: It started the day of initial attack in July 2018. It was hot. We were on the, I think, July in Redding and Shasta County, we were at, triple digit weather, like, it was hot even for Redding for July. About 1:00, 1:30, we heard over the radio that there was a fire near Carr Powerhouse Road, which is next to our historic district, the Tower House Historic District, which is like a concentration of your most important cultural resources, layers of history there, prehistoric, historic.

Daniel: So it's July 2018. The temperatures are getting up into the low 100 degrees. It's very hot. I'm imagining it's not cooling off a whole lot at night.

Jennifer: I think it was like 113, 114, we were bumping up against the highest temperatures ever recorded in the park.

Daniel: Wow. So it's very hot, very dry. And you hear on the radio, okay, there's a fire. And I bet-- I'm guessing that at that point that wasn't unusual. You've heard a lot of fires come in over the radio, maybe even some that summer. And so you go to check it out. At that point, everything feels routine, I guess.

Jennifer: Yeah. No, we -- it was something we do regularly, like, you know, there's fire. We could stand on the highway, tie in with the duty officer, make sure, you know, just be there if they need information, not get in the way. We give them advice if they need it. This is what we do. But this one just went completely sideways. Seeing fire taking off so... spreading so rapidly and erratically, the weirdest thing that I saw was fire zipped around a hillside sideways. Like fire goes uphill, right, naturally, and it follows winds. And it wasn't really that windy out, but it went around sideways, and I'm like, well, that's really weird. And then the fire spotted into this historic orchard where we have these really old orchard trees that were planted in the 1800s so they're unique heirloom varieties. And all of a sudden I started watching them burn and I'm like, oh my God, it's like 20 years of restoration, if not more, trying to save these orchard trees and stabilize them, and we've been working so hard, and we'd just grazed this whole area with goats to keep the weeds down and for fire suppression. And I was standing there on the highway going like, is this really happening? And then it burned down a historic structure that we just restored. And then it spotted behind me on the other side of the highway where that historic house is. It's one of the oldest homes in Shasta County. This was not ever something I could fathom happening at such a rapid pace. And there's water drops, dozers are being pushed, helicopters were overhead... And yeah, within the, the first couple hours it was completely chaotic, like there was nothing we could have done to stop that fire. I think the hard part was, there was a seasonal, she was screaming into the radio, like, "somebody get my therapy dog!" And we're like, oh my god, her therapy dog's in park housing, which is up the canyon. And two of the guys I work with, they went up there, kicked the door down, grabbed the dog -- they got the therapy dog right before the building burned down. And it was it was really, really intense -- like, all the things that I could never, ever wrap my head around were happening so fast. And that was the first hour of the Carr Fire. I'm not proud of a lot of the decisions that I made, but I never thought I would be pushed into making rapid fire decisions like this.

Daniel: So right away, one of your biggest concerns is that because of where the fire starts, some historic buildings, some Indigenous archeological sites, you know, a historic orchard, and park housing, you know right from the start that all of those are threatened by this fire. And so you're making calculations and decisions about how to protect those resources from the very start.

Jennifer: Yep. Yeah. Correct.

Daniel: And some of those choices are hard. Like, I imagine when you're fighting fire, you don't usually want to just, send the bulldozers and all the heavy equipment in right away, because those are obviously destructive in their own way. But if it's a choice between bulldozers or burning up in a fire, you pick the bulldozers. And so that was one of the first hard choices you have to make, it sounds like.

Jennifer: Yeah, so in urban interface parks like Santa Monica Mountains and Whiskeytown, you know, working with bulldozers is a part of, of life. Like you, you have to accept some level of impact to protect communities. So it's-- it's life and property first. More wilderness parks, you know, like parks with sequoias, it might be... life and sequoias might be your priority.

Daniel: That's the kind of decision that you're actually probably used to making. You've been around fires you, and usually you have hours, if not days, to kind of think through the balance between bulldozers and letting a certain area burn or not, like there's usually more time. But in this case, it went from thinking about those questions to then almost instantly it just being about putting the fire out as fast as possible because things were burning so fast.

Jennifer: Yeah. No, the whole park burned in three days, three operational periods. We lost structures, park housing, infrastructure, the community on of French Gulch lost homes, the community of Old Shasta was wiped out, the um, Keswick was wiped out like, by the F3 fire tornado went through Keswick, and then the west side communities. It was completely devastating. And then never could have imagined a F3 fire tornado going into a community, a town where there's homes and a Chase Bank, you know? [laughs in disbelief] So that's unimaginable to me. But again, you know, keep in mind also that the Carr Fire was just, what was it, 4 or 5 months right before the Camp Fire and the Woolsey Fire. And these were other destructive fires. And the Camp Fire was far more destructive than the Carr Fire. So the Carr Fire should have been a wake up call for everybody else. But it caught those communities off guard, too.

Daniel: Yeah. So you said that those first few hours were a literal whirlwind. What happened next?

Jennifer: You know, I had to regroup with my staff. And almost everybody is a qualified and experienced Resource Advisor. So they knew-- they're experienced with fire, they knew what to do. They put on their Nomex and-- but for some reason, throughout the fire, like we kept thinking that we would catch it. Because resources were not limited, like there were no other fires going on in the area. So Redding has like, you know, you have Cal Fire, you have Redding smokejumpers, hotshots, Forest Service, you have all these resources right there in Redding. And so when resources aren't limited, you know, you kind of think like, well, you know, you can throw the world at this thing and we can get it out. But we did. We threw the world at it. And it was we could not put that fire out. And, we launched dozers immediately. And I kept thinking to myself, like, well, we'll catch it, we'll catch it. And, it ended up like each time we, we couldn't catch it. And, we were completely shocked. And I was just completely like, each time I went home, at the end of the day, I'm like, I should start making piles to evacuate, you know? So I would make piles and, but I'm like, "we'll catch it. This can't be." And it was this, state of disbelief, I think. But, I think the third night, about 10:00 at night, I had a coworker call me, and he's like, Jen, you have to go to Whiskeytown Dam. You have to see this. And, I'm like, "it's 10:00 at night. It's hot out, like what's happening?" So I drove up to the park and went to the dam, and there was like hundreds of people on the dam, visitors like-- and they're all out there watching the fire blow up, and it's nighttime. So this is when you have-- the humidity's supposed to go up. Fire behavior is supposed to go down. You're supposed to have some nighttime recovery. But it was still really hot. It was probably like 110 at night. And the fire was plume-dominated fire behavior at night. Like it was behaving like it was three in the afternoon. And my neighborhood was quiet, and I made some piles. I called my neighbor, I'm like, "hey, you guys should think about making piles. I don't-- I think we got another day or so to evacuate. But, you know, this isn't looking good." And I went to sleep and then, about two in the morning, a friend of mine, he's working dispatch for the park, he called me. It's like-- so nobody shows up. You don't get a sheriff doesn't knock on your door. This guy called me and says, "Jen, you need to evacuate now." And I went outside and it was like, a war zone. And there's, like, embers raining down. I could hear propane tanks blowing up. The lights were flickering and the sky was, like, seething. Like like somebody was using a massive giant bellows to just stoke the fire because the whole sky was covered with smoke and this weird orange haze. But it was just like going up and down, and I was like, what the hell's happening? Called my neighbors, they're like, "we're packing." And, then I just grabbed all that I could, and, and my chimes were like, ding ding ding ding ding ding ding, just the chimes hanging on the deck were just, like, going in circles. It was really bizarre. I went inside, I said goodbye to my house, said goodbye to my house plants. Which is a really weird thing to do. I watered them all and I'm like, "I'll be right back, guys, hang in there." And I thought my house would make it. I really did. And at this time I'm really worried about park staff because I, you know, we already lost seasonal housing and I'm like, where is everybody? You know, it's four in the morning. I called her administrative officer. She's like, "I got tabs on everybody. Don't worry. Just get out of there." So my dog and I, with my great grandmother's table, evacuated to a motel. You know, leaving the driveway, I said goodbye to my neighbors and hugged them and showed up at a Motel 6 in Redding and-- with a bunch of other disheveled people, like at four in the morning, just like they're in shock, you know? And I know that they just evacuated. So we were all checking into hotels. So at this point, a significant portion of the west side of Redding evacuated to the east, to evacuation shelters, friends homes, you know, motels. But, you know, we thought that like, you know, maybe everything was going to be okay. You know, maybe the house will make it. You know, "I've been burning piles around my house. It's in good shape, it'll make it." It is just being in a state of shock.

Daniel: Wow. Over the course of those first few days then the fire, you know, is potentially moving towards your own home and you're in a state of kind of disbelief that it could burn your own home.

Jennifer: Yeah. We evacuated the north side of the park where the fire was. But on the south side of the park we still had visitors. We still had people in park housing. But we thought there was no way the fire was going to cross the lake. Well, sure enough, there was a fire, mini fire tornado or vortex set up, and it lay down horizontally across the ground, according -- I wasn't there -- and spotted across the lake. So this launched a massive evacuation on the south side of the lake of people that were camping and on that side and park housing units. And this was important because I to me, a lot of the law enforcement personnel, a lot of us lived in Old Shasta. We lived on the boundary of the park. They had to make a choice between evacuating, helping their-- their spouses and families evacuate, and they had to make the choice to evacuate visitors. So I think that was really hard on a lot of those emergency responders being at that point. And then they had to clear all those people off the dam who were watching this. It was, again, you know, we never knew this would happen. Yeah.

Daniel: So we talked about, those first hours, we talked about the intensity and challenge of the first few days, and then how on the third and fourth day, people are evacuated, housing is being burned down, and there are vortexes of fire, basically conditions so hot and intense that there's tornadoes made of flames burning and spotting across the entire lake. And the fire is beyond apocalyptic. It's it's really into something new.

Jennifer: When I evacuated the motel, it was, you know, you didn't sleep. You know, you show up at your motel at four, you're like, what is happening? And then, that morning was all about like, "where-- where are the interns? Where are the seasonals? Are they okay?" We got them into hotels. Like, where is everybody on the west side of Redding? Like, you know, people that live there. Is everybody okay? So the park's in a shambles. And I heard that the fire had passed through my neighborhood, but my house had made it and my neighbor's house hadmade it. And I was like, "all right, I did it! You know, like, all my fuels treatments, weed whacking, all my work, you know, I was like, I knew it, I knew I could make it." And so that day was really about sitting and waiting, having park meetings, seeing where everybody's at and trying to get an Incident Management Team in to help, and watching the news and texting. So there's like group texts of park staff going back and forth. And, and it wasn't until like the evening, like the fire activity picked up again and the lights in the motel started flickering, you know, and then the power went off, and I'm like, oh my God, what the hell's happening out there? And I went to another location I saw that had power and air conditioning. And I was watching the news and I could see-- and there's my neighborhood, like where my house is, my neighbor's house is -- it's a crown fire. And people are texting me like, "Jen, your your street's on fire on the news" and the local State Parks superintendent, she's out there hosing down State Park, you know, buildings. And it was pretty traumatic. And people had to evacuate a second time in Redding. So this was another wave. So people in evacuation centers had to evacuate, people in homes that evacuated. So people had to evacuate the second time, I had to evacuate a second time. And that's one of my lessons learned. If you evacuate the first time, don't unpack, because you might have to evacuate the second time. And I got with my dog in my car, and I got on the I-5 and it was packed with people, like it was jammed. And I looked up and I could see that fire tornado. And that's when I really thought -- like it was totally irrational, like, but maybe I was just so exhausted, I had so much adrenaline in my blood, and I really thought that that tornado was going to get me. And I was stopped in traffic on the highway. And that's one of my things, you know, like I get stuck on a highway in traffic when a fire comes. And so I managed to get on an off ramp. And then going north on I-5 was a lot clearer. And I made progress. And I just kept driving. And each hotel they were were packed with people, like there was no vacancy, especially no dog friendly vacancy. So I just ended up driving all night. I drove all the way to Oregon, and it was on that drive that I found out that I lost my house. A firefighter checked on my property and he's like, "Jen, it's gone." And he sent me a text with a picture of it on fire. And, you know, it was good that he let me know. And I'm like, I was just in shock. So it was-- finally made it to Oregon, made it to a safe space.

Daniel: Wow. So it only took a matter of days. But all of Whiskeytown National Recreation Area, this entire park unit, the whole thing burned, right?

Jennifer: Yeah. 97% of the park burned. So the final statistics were 47 structures destroyed. A third of the park staff lost their homes. And then there was significant damage to the concessionaire operations and to a... we have an environmental school, an environmental camp. So all in all, the Carr Fire was 229,000 acres. 1604 structures were lost overall, and eight fatalities.

Daniel: So I'm guessing then the next several weeks were a continued state of anxiety and chaos for you. But of course, it doesn't end there. A lot of your work, I think, then was on the aftermath of the fire and, okay, what happens now that the fire's out?

Jennifer: So the hard thing is that when you have a fire in your park, you're going to sprint. Like you're going to sprint as hard as you can, and you're going to run as fast as you can. But there's like a finish line. You know, it's like you're gonna just -- you're going to just exhaust yourself to that finish line. Once you cross that finish line, the post-fire world is a marathon. Whiskeytown has significant infrastructure. We have the dam infrastructure with Bureau of Reclamation. We have the telecommunications site for the sheriff's office at the top of the peak, highest mountain. And then we had, a major highway goes through the middle of the park. And then we have Pacific Gas and Electric. So we had all these power lines, we have all this infrastructure, and they all had to get online. And to do that we needed to be Resource Advisors again. Even though it's an emergency, you need some level of compliance a little bit, you know, to make sure there's no prehistoric site there you know. You know, I just-- my first day back after I found out my house burned and we had a meeting of the archeologists, myself, and our acting superintendent. And here's this room full of engineers, you know, highway engineers, there's like 25 of them, and they're like, "we've got X amount of million dollars to install these structures to protect our highway, and you guys need to do the compliance." [laughs incredulously] So it's like, so we, we we really kept going and going and going. It was really hard to stop and process.

Daniel: Yeah Jen, talk to me-- talk to me about the mental health impacts of going through something like this. For you, but for the, for the community and for the staff of a national park. What's that like?

Jennifer: It's like the grief that keeps on giving. It's layers and layers of grief. It's grieving my house, my memories and my property that I love so much. Grieving my park and you know, the restoration, all that work put into that park and places that I loved. Grieving my community, my neighbors all moved away. Like grieving with them. You go to all their going away parties, and then you get tired of it. And then park staff start to leave, so you're you're going to they're going away parties. [laughs] And everybody processes it very differently. And that has to be okay. Like, I, saw some people got very emotional right away and they wanted to talk to CISM right away. I couldn't talk to the Critical Incident Stress Management people because I felt like if I took that moment, I wouldn't be able to put myself back together again and keep going. I had to keep going. And we were so busy with trying to get power up and internet up and back in our offices and, utility companies and get the BAER implemented, it-- it took us until we got a superintendent, a permanent superintendent showed up, and he was like, "wow, this-- these people need help." And so he got-- he called EAP, Employee Assistance Program, and he got a clinical psychologist to come and talk to us as a group. And it was like the first time in nine months -- nine months -- that we all sat together as a, you know, employees, and talked it out. And she got up there and she was like, "well, all the other agencies like Cal Fire, the Sheriff's Department, PG&E, all these different entities and agencies, they got employee assistance like the week after the fire. Why did it take the National Park Service nine months? And we were ground zero. We were the most impacted. So that was I think a real important point to me is, you need to get that help in soon.

Daniel: You know, one thing that struck me that you said was that it felt out of control, it felt chaotic, and that maybe even you're not proud of all of the decisions that were made, but that that is the result of the chaos in a moment of such intensity like that. Maybe that's one of the lessons that you have taken from the fire in general, is what's possible in those first intense hours.

Jennifer: We were completely caught off guard. And I don't know if it's complacency, like, you know, you know your park, you know your ecosystems, you know your fire, and you think you know what's going to happen. But it's one of those situations where everything went sideways, like what you knew was no longer reality. And that, to me, is a really good lesson learned. And it translates well over to other parks where, some parks have been doing fire/climate scenario workshops, where they're trying to really think like, what is the worst thing? And the worst thing that can happen, like happened to them that year. Like Lassen had the Dixie fire, Sequoia has lost 20% of their monarch sequoias. Like these things are happening this year, not 20 years out. And so the Carr Fire to me was the worst thing that could happen. Like it was unimaginable, not even 20 years out. It would be like, oh God, I couldn't even fathom having this happen to my park. But it did. It happened in 2018. And that's one of the things that's consistently happening in national parks with not only just fire, but other climate-related disasters. We're completely being caught off guard time and time again.

Daniel: Wow. In your most climate apocalyptic vision of the future, you never thought that the Carr fire could happen. Like it-- that was that was your worst case scenario, darkest imagination of what the future might be. And then it actually happened.

Jennifer: You can see, like what's happening in Yosemite National Park, where there's actually parts of the park that's type converting due to the frequency of fire. And what happened at Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks is also really relevant in that, you know, I think they did climate/fire scenario planning in the late 2000s, maybe 2018, 2017. I'm not sure of the year. But again, they did that thing of "what's the worst thing that can happen to the sequoias? You know, they're pest resistant. They're fire resistant. What's the worst thing that can happen?" And it was like, "well, they become susceptible to pests, and then they become susceptible to fire." And then sure enough, you know, they had the Castle Rattlesnake Complex, I think 2020, I believe. And that took out a significant portion of the large monarch sequoia trees. And then they were like, oh my God, we gotta do something. And then in 2021, they didn't have a chance to strategize, come up with a plan. In 2021, it took out another big chunk of large monarch sequoia trees, which are supposed to be fire resistant. And so 20% of the large trees are dead, like they're a thousand year old trees. And they've survived tons and tons of fire, and we're watching them just disappear. So the park is taking some radical actions. They're being really proactive, and they're really trying to hold the ground on the remaining sequoias. And I'm really-- and so is Yosemite, with their groves.

Daniel: So this is a case study of these, just the really big sequoia trees. And people didn't think they were susceptible to wildfire because they have such thick bark and they're adapted to it. But now we're seeing with climate change, the conditions are just different that the fire is happening in. And it turns out these big trees, they can be susceptible to wildfire. And in recent years they have been and they have been lost.

Jennifer: Yeah. And it's, you know, two years. Like, you know, 2020-2021. Like that's a short time frame to come up with a quick strategy. All right Park, what are you going to do? [laughs] How are you going to hold the line and save the rest of them? You know it'd be nice if you had ten, twenty years to develop a plan and a strategy. But parks are having to pivot pretty quickly and decide what ecosystems, what resources are priorities, what are they going to save and what can you save and then what you can't. So similar to like, probably like glaciers. What can you do?

Daniel: I mean, it sounds like the advice you would give is that like, you're trying to tell people this is a wake up call. Everyone needs to be paying attention and ready to move way faster than they think they need to move. What-- I mean, is there other advice, or is there another lesson that has come across in watching these fires for you?

Jennifer: To me, I-- after the Carr Fire, like I had this sense of panic and urgency where I want to see, you know, people take fuels reduction and defensive space seriously. It's been hard because after going through something like that, oftentimes people perceive you as being like, "well, she's been traumatized. You know, like this is just her processing." I'm like, no, like I think the Park Service needs to invest in preparedness, response and helping parks recover. We have great people working in preparedness, but it's typically in law enforcement or in fire. But it needs to be an interdisciplinary approach. And I'm a fan of facilitated scenario planning workshops where everybody's at the table and you run through scenarios of it, whether it's flooding or fire or whatever. You run through scenarios to make sure you have evacuation plans. You figure out where the gaps are in your plans, and your weaknesses, and you address them. And then make sure you're all on the same page with your priorities. Like if if you did have to evacuate your park. And again, it has to be top down and a priority from your superintendent, all the way up to your regional director and the director. I think another thing parks can do is invest in your Resource Advisor program. If you care about your natural and cultural resources in your park, and you're a fire park, or have the potential of fire, the best thing you can do is get your staff trained, send them out, get them experience. If you talk to these people that have gone through the Camp Fire, or firefighters who have seen fire severity change across the West, I'm sure they will say the same thing. It's just like, I feel like it's Groundhog Day, right? Like park after park is just-- we're doing the same thing every day. Are we getting more prepared? Are we getting better at responding? We need definitely need to get better at helping parks recover. But I don't, you know-- we need to start moving in those directions a lot quicker.

Daniel: This should be a wake up call. They should be expecting the worst case scenario. Jen, I'm curious if you feel like you're healed, if you have fully processed the Carr Fire, or if that's an ongoing thing. And then I'm also curious if, you know, helping other parks and talking to other parks about their intense fire experiences, if that's been a helpful process or, or not so helpful in your own kind of coming to terms with with wildfire.

Jennifer: I think trauma is a bad thing in general, but it's made me wiser or wary. I'm all about being prepared. And going through any sort of traumatic event, it could be like a loss of a loved one, you know, or, whatever it may be, it's horrid, absolutely horrid. But there are moments of beauty and love intermixed, which makes it a really complex emotion. So the strong bonds that I formed with the staff at Whiskeytown going through this with them will always, forever be there. My neighbors and my community, they will always be my neighbors. We'll always reach out to each other. We always send Christmas cards or holiday cards. We're always there for each other. We have this common bond now that we went through something and we made it together, and I think that's the beauty in it.

[beat begins to play]

Daniel: Jennifer Gibson, thanks so much for sharing your story. This has been really valuable.

Jennifer: Yeah, thanks you guys for doing this. I'm so impressed. And thanks for listening.

[music plays under the credits]

Peri: We spent most of this episode talking about a national recreation area in California; Whiskey Town. They have lots more details about fire and climate change on their website, nps.gov/WHIS you can learn more about fire and climate change on Glacier’s website too, nps.gov/GLAC. It is worth underlining how easily this story could be about any other national park, including Glacier. Wildfires burn here almost every single summer—most recently, we had quite intense fire seasons in 2015, 2017, and 2018. Famously, the Sprague fire burned down part of the beloved Sperry Chalet in 2017. A key partner in helping rebuild the Sperry Chalet was our non-profit partner, the Glacier National Park Conservancy. Beyond fire, the Conservancy helps Glacier with many sustainability efforts: from solar panels on park buildings to storytelling projects like this one, the Conservancy is doing critical work to prevent the worst impacts of climate change. You can learn more about what they do and about how to get involved at Glacier.org. This show is created by Daniel Lombardi, Michael Faist, Gabi Eseverri, and me, Peri Sasnett. We get critical support from Lacy Kowalski, Melissa Sladek, Kristen Friesen, and so many good people with Glacier's natural and cultural resource teams. Our music was made by the brilliant Frank Waln, and the show's cover art is by our sweet friend Stella Nall. Check out Frank and Stella's work at the links in the show notes. Besides sharing this episode with a friend who might appreciate it, you can help us out by leaving a rating and review in your podcast app. Thanks for listening.

Planning a trip to Glacier and don't know what to wear? We've got fashion tips for you, along with the latest news from the park.

Glacier Conservancy: glacier.org Frank Waln music: www.instagram.com/frankwaln Stella Nall art: stellanall.com

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TRANSCRIPT:

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Lacy: Headquarters is brought to you by the Glacier National Park Conservancy.

Peri: Welcome to Headwaters. I'm Peri.

Madeline: And I'm Madeline.

Peri: Headwaters is a science and history show about Glacier National Park. And this is a special bonus episode for those of you considering coming to the park this summer or fall. And today we have for you a series of breaking news headlines, each followed by some fashion advice from Madeline.

Madeline: That's right.

Peri: We should just play the little like breaking news. *Dun dun dun dun dun dun dun dun dun dun* [Newscaster music starts] Going-to-the-Sun Road is open all the way to Logan Pass. And do remember you need a vehicle reservation if you're coming in from the west side between 6 a.m. and 3 p.m. Madeline, what fashion advice would you give to someone driving the road?

Madeline: I think people hear "driving," and they're like, all I need are my driving flip flops, what they don't think about is you're going to want to get out of your car. At least once I'd say.

Peri: At least once.

Madeline: Statistically.

Peri: Probably.

Madeline: So pack your hiking flipflops as well.

Peri: Great advice.

Madeline: Thank you.

Peri: All right. [Newscaster music] As of July 3rd, the Highline Trail is not open. The upper half of the Grinnell Glacier Trail is also not open, and something to keep in mind is that even trails that are open, anything at high elevation you may encounter snow, including on the trail to Hidden Lake Overlook. Snow is always wet. It's always cold. It can be pretty slippery or even dangerous, so keep that in mind for at least a few more weeks if you're hiking in the park. Madeline, what do people need if they're hiking on snow?

Madeline: I have two boxes in my head. I've got waterproofing and traction. There's a lot of ways to accomplish that. Maybe hiking boots.

Peri: Sure.

Madeline: If you don't have hiking boots, maybe you have grocery bags and soccer cleats. Why not combine those? So put those grocery bags on your feet. Put those feet in your soccer cleats. Suddenly you're checking those boxes.

Peri: I love that. It's very childhood snow day chic. [Newscaster music] The free shuttles are up and running for the season. You can take the shuttle bus instead of driving, and you don't need a vehicle reservation for that. And you can stop at a bunch of different places along going to the town road. Do expect the shuttles to be full and busy, though. They're quite popular. Madeline, what should people consider wearing for the shuttle bus?

Madeline: The tagline for that whole experience is see and be seen. There are strangers around you. Suddenly you're part of the attraction of the road. If that is something you care about, just wear your favorite outfit.

Peri: Totally. [Newscaster music] In other news, park lakes are open to paddling. Lake McDonald, Bowman, Kintla, Two Medicine are all open to personal non-motorized watercraft if you get them inspected before heading out to prevent the spread of aquatic invasive species. Some park lakes are also open to motorized boats, but those require more extensive inspection. Madeline. What fashion advice do you have for people doing paddling?

Madeline: Everyone knows that you're on water. I don't think enough people are thinking about water getting on you. So maybe think about a poncho.

Peri: Love a poncho.

Madeline: Preferably clear, so that others can see your life jacket and be inspired by your sartorial example.

Peri: Love that. [Newscaster music] The longest running Indigenous speaker series in the National Park Service is in full swing for the summer. That means almost every night somewhere in the park one of Glacier's Tribal partners is giving a public presentation for free. Madeline, what do you wear when you go to an NAS program?

Madeline: I want to be able to focus, so bug protection is top of mind for me.

Peri: Yes.

Madeline: This is the time for a head to toe bodysuit. Pull that out of the back of your closet. If you don't have that, bug net over a wide brimmed hat. Ankle protection. Close toed shoes.

Peri: Yes. Protect the hands and feet.

Madeline: The probisci of the mosquito here? They're strong and they're long. [Peri laughs] And you don't want that getting anywhere near your skin.

Peri: That's great advice.

Madeline: Thank you.

Peri: Finally, our last headline. [Newscaster music] The fishing season is open for summer 2024. Within park boundaries, you do not need a fishing license, but there are still a variety of rules and regulations, so be familiar with those. And remember that all native fish you catch have to be released. Madeline, what's your fishing fit?

Madeline: All right, I've gone fishing twice, [Peri laughs] so I feel pretty qualified to talk about this. I've also seen lots of pictures of people holding fish. So from both those things, I'm going to say pockets.

Peri: Like those vests with all the pockets.

Madeline: Yes.

Peri: Do you put the fish in the pockets?

Madeline: Like, if you want to. I think that's... With pockets, you have options so you can put the fish in there. You can put snacks in there. You can put snacks for the fish in there. And then you also don't want to forget a big smile. That seems to be pretty key.

Peri: The best accessory.

Madeline: Yeah. So it's like people have a really big fish and then they have a really big smile. And...

Peri: And the pocket.

Madeline: They seem correlated. Yeah.

Peri: Well, thanks for the advice, Madeline, and thanks everyone for tuning in. We have more bonus episodes coming soon, and we are also working on a new big season of Headwaters that will be released next year.

Madeline: Headwaters is made possible by our partner, the Glacier National Park Conservancy.

Peri: We could not do this without them, and if you want to help us out, you could leave a review in iTunes or your podcast app and share the show with your friends.

Madeline: ITunes? Does that even exist anymore? [Newscaster music fades in]

Peri: Yeah, maybe I'll say Apple.

Madeline: Thank you for listening!

Peri: And Happy Fourth of July.

A mini mailbag episode answering listener-submitted questions. Send us your questions for future episodes at [email protected] with the subject "Headwaters."

Glacier Conservancy: glacier.org Frank Waln music: www.instagram.com/frankwaln Stella Nall art: stellanall.com

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TRANSCRIPT:

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Gaby Eseverri: [mellow beat playing] Hi, I'm Gaby. You're listening to Headwaters, a podcast from Glacier National Park.

Daniel Lombardi: Hey, Gaby, I'm Daniel.

Gaby: [laughs] Hi, Daniel.

Daniel: And this is the mailbag or Q&A episode. We're answering questions.

Gaby: Yeah. So listeners have provided questions for us over the last week or so. [music fades out] And I'll be asking you what the people want to know.

Daniel: Oh, you're asking me?

Gaby: I'll be asking you.

Daniel: I'm not ready for this.

Gaby: We're releasing bonus episodes this spring and summer to help visitors plan their trips to the park, or to just generally get a feel for what's going on.

Daniel: What do you got for me?

Gaby: What do you think was our most asked question?

Daniel: I think the question that rangers get asked the most is where is the bathroom? But I bet you people want to know when is Going-to-the-Sun Road going to open for the summer.

Gaby: Ding ding ding.

Daniel: That's right?

Gaby: Yeah yeah,.

Daniel: Yeah. Everyone, everyone wants to know when is Going-to-the-Sun Road going to open for the summer because it feels like it's not summer till the sun road opens. Well, sorry, we don't have an answer.

Gaby: We really don't know. We don't have any, like, further, more information than what you know.

Daniel: I could say that it seems to usually open in June -- the roads crew are actively plowing it right now -- sometimes early July, but generally it's sometime in June. If it's like a low snow year and we don't have a whole lot of snow in the winter, then it opens in the earlier side of June. If it is a big snowy winter, then it's probably going to be later in June, if not early summer.

Gaby: Or a rainy spring.

Daniel: Yeah, spring weather matters a lot too. Yeah, yeah. Bad weather, avalanches, all that slows the work down.

Gaby: Yeah. Hopefully it'll be open soon. I'm excited. It will definitely mark the arrival of summer. Angela says, can you just talk about beargrass?

Daniel: I… I will try. Uh, beargrass is not a grass, it is a member of the corn lily family. I mean, it is a flower, basically. It has grass on the bottom, and what people love then is that every few years, each plant will shoot up a big asparagus- Dr. Seuss-type flower that looks like a giant q-tip, sometimes like 3 or 4 feet tall.

Gaby: They don't pop up yearly, right?

Daniel: Right. You know, as spring comes along like this, we're always like, is this going to be a big flower year? When was the last time we had a big bear grass year? But there's always there's always some bear grass and...

Gaby: Yeah.

Daniel: I love it.

Gaby: I guess we'll see what this year looks like. [beat plays briefly] Sridevi asks, what are the places to visit without a vehicle reservation? That's a, that's a big one.

Daniel: Yeah. So in 2024 you do need a vehicle reservation, but that's only to get into the busiest parts of the park during the busiest hours of the day in the peak summer season. So if you're visiting in the fall, you don't need to worry about it. If you like to get up early or drive into the park late, again, you don't need to worry about it. It's just for those peak hours. Now, also, it's not for every area of the park. In summer 2024, entering into Two Medicine or the east side of Going-to-the-Sun Road at St Mary. You don't need a vehicle reservation for those areas either. And I promise they are spectacular areas of the park.

Gaby: Truly amazing. Yeah. Yeah. Okay, awesome. Hopefully that's helpful. And as always, check nps.gov/glac for more information and all of the details about vehicle reservation. [beat plays briefly] Claire wants to know, what's it like working for the park. You've been working for the park for seven years, right?

Daniel: This park, yeah. I've made a career out of working for the Park Service, and I love it. The best part about working for the Park Service is that you are working in and getting to, you know, be a part of these amazing places. I love being a part of something that is like, iconic of our country and our landscape and a thing that we all share together. Working for the parks is amazing. I highly recommend it. Go to USAjobs.gov and watch for ranger postings. [beat plays briefly] Give me another one. Give me a hard one.

Gaby: Okay. Olive asks, what are people most surprised about after visiting?

Daniel: Maybe a big surprise is how cold and how like wet the weather can be, especially in the first half of summer.

Gaby: Totally like in West Glacier or East Glacier it'll be beautiful and sunny, and then you go up to Logan Pass and it's snowing.

Daniel: Like literally snowing. Yeah. The other thing I think that can surprise people about the weather is how in the second half of summer, how hot it can be. They'll be like, oh, it's Glacier National Park, it's the mountains. It'll be cool. But then they start going on a hike with one little water bottle and they're like, oh...

Gaby: It's hot and.

Daniel: It's over 90 degrees. And yeah, it's kind of humid. And yeah, it can get really hot.

Gaby: Yeah. Last summer it hit 100.

Daniel: Wow.

Gaby: [beat plays briefly] So Jack has a question about construction.

Daniel: Okay, Jack, here's the situation. In Montana, we have two seasons: winter and construction.

Gaby: Ha ha. [sarcastic laugh]

Daniel: Yeah. And here we are entering construction season. There's all kinds of jokes about this. You know, the traffic cones, that they put out around construction sites?

Gaby: The bright neon orange.

Daniel: I've heard people joke that that's, you know, Montana State flower. I think other states make these jokes, too.

Gaby: Definitely, yeah.

Daniel: But it's true, the window for construction in Glacier National Park is pretty small because we have such a long winter season, so you have to squeeze all the repair and update, you know, projects into a pretty narrow window. So you can hear the construction going on outside right now. There is construction going on in the park, a whole bunch of different areas, you know, they're working on bridges, they're putting in new sewer lines.

Gaby: They're doing a lot of work. So it will most likely be a part of your visit. Yeah.

Daniel: But if you're just flexible, like it shouldn't be a big deal.

Gaby: Yeah. Not a big deal at all. Check nps.gov/glac for all of those construction updates and all those details as to where those projects are going to be.

Daniel: Yeah, that's basically the answer to everything. Go on our website. Check it out. Yeah. Plan ahead.

Gaby: [beat plays briefly] Okay. This is [laughs] maybe one of my favorite questions that we got. MissCurlyGirly asks, is the damage reversible?

Daniel: This question is sort of silly and also like kind of deep, right, which is fun. Having no idea what curlygirly is actually asking about, I would say let's be optimistic. Let's envision a better future than the one we're living in, you know?

Gaby: Totally.

Daniel: The damage is reversible. We can fix things that are broken and we can...

Gaby: Imagine better futures.

Daniel: Absolutely.

Gaby: [beat plays briefly] This is a little bit of a history question. Are you ready for this?

Daniel: I'll give it a shot.

Gaby: Zach wants to know, how did the whole Glacier-Waterton connection come to be?

Daniel: Well, that is a good question. Basically, there was Rotary Clubs, these are like community social clubs, and they started talking about how these two national parks that share an international border could be and should be an example to the world about international peaceful cooperation. And they sort of developed the concept and everyone liked it, got behind it, and in the 1930s, the international, the world's first international peace park was born.

Gaby: Glacier-Waterton.

Daniel: Well, technically, it's Waterton Glacier International Peace Park.

Gaby: And Zach, if you want to learn more, I would recommend going back to Season One and listening to the Goat Haunt episode where Michael and Andrew dive deeper into Waterton-Glacier International Peace Park.

Daniel: Yeah, that's a good idea. I was I thought you were going to say go to the website. I'm like, oh, people are going to be tired of hearing that.

Gaby: Oh no no, no.

Daniel: Yeah. But it's so true though.

Gaby: [beat plays briefly] I have three from Elizabeth.

Daniel: [laughing] I didn't know three questions was allowed, but okay, let's hear them.

Gaby: What do we do when we see fellow tourists not following Leave No Trace principles? Ooh.

Daniel: Yeah, that's hard. I mean, it's not your job to police other people. That's said, I feel like if you have the social skills and the situation is... allows for it, find a way to be friendly and...

Gaby: And be curious, yeah, I would say ask some questions before we make assumptions as to what people are doing or if they're doing something quote unquote wrong.

Daniel: Yeah, yeah. I mean, if you see something dangerous or blatantly illegal happening, you should definitely tell a ranger. But trust that everyone's doing their best.

Gaby: Totally.

Daniel: And that being friendly goes a long way.

Gaby: Absolutely. How do we convince people that nature is worth protecting as much as people?

Daniel: That's a good question. I like that one. You know, people are nature. The national parks operate with the belief that a really important part about getting people to care about the world around them, and to care about this country's history and making the world a better place is learning and experiencing and making connections firsthand. So that is a really central part of the mission of the National Park Service is to give people an opportunity to come visit natural places like Glacier National Park and make those connections and realize why that's so important to protect and preserve and honor.

Gaby: Yeah, totally. Okay. Elizabeth has one more question.

Daniel: Oh is it, what's my favorite beetle? I knew it.

Gaby: That's exactly right.

Daniel: Mountain pine beetles. A natural insect that eats away at pine trees in the park. It's not good for those pine trees, but it's good for the ecosystem as a whole. And they're cool little beetles.

Gaby: Are these the beetles on whitebark pines?

Daniel: Pretty much every species of tree in the park has an associated species of beetle. So, yeah, whitebark pine included.

Gaby: That's so cool. And if you want to know more about beetles or whitebark pine, you can go listen to Season Two of the podcast. Of course. Thanks, Elizabeth, for those questions. [beat plays briefly] Okay, so the next question is from Lane, who wants to know how has climate change impacted the way the park is managed?

Daniel: Yeah, that's a good question. I mean, it's... it would actually probably be simpler to say how has climate change not impacted the way the park is managed, because it it infiltrates every decision made in the National Park Service at this point. There are broadly four big categories in how the National Park Service is responding to climate change. One is through communication. So just doing things like podcast episodes about, you know, educating on the topic. Then there's science. There are scientists actively studying how a shifting climate is directly impacting the resources or the plants, animals, history, culture and all of that. How that's being impacted. But then on top of communication and science, there is also a whole lot of adaptation work. Basically people studying and thinking about how, okay, we have more wildfire now because of climate change, how do we need to shift our response to wildfire in the face of that? Right. And then the fourth big area of the National Park Service's response to climate change is mitigation. And that means that we're trying to actively reduce the amount of greenhouse gases that are emitted inside the national park, reducing the amount of fossil fuels burned, stuff like that.

Gaby: How are we doing that?

Daniel: Putting solar panels on roofs, switching to more fuel efficient or zero emission vehicles, recycling, composting basically anywhere we can find ways to reduce the park's emissions, we're trying to do that.

Gaby: And that's not just here, right? That's across the National Park Service.

Daniel: Yeah, it's across the federal government in general.

Gaby: That's great. How might visitors see and/or experience everything that you talked about?

Daniel: Well, if you come to Glacier National Park in your electric vehicle, you can plug it in and charge it with pretty much renewable energy resources that we have here, with hydropower. You're going to see solar panels on the roofs of some buildings. But you're also going to experience the impacts of climate change. Almost inevitably, it gets a lot hotter here in the summers than it used to. We have a lot more wildfire smoke than we used to.

Gaby: And of course, the namesake of this park.

Daniel: Everyone wants to come and hike to a glacier, or take a look at the glaciers as they melt. So that's a big part of the visitor experience these days.

Gaby: [beat plays briefly] Okay Daniel, I'm going to close it out with one more question.

Daniel: Okay.

Gaby: Okay. What snakes are in the park?

Daniel: We have two kinds of snakes. They're both garter snakes, we have two species of garter snakes. And neither of them are venomous or dangerous. Snakes are cool. A lot of people don't come here for the snakes, but they really should.

Gaby: [laughing] It's always, "where can I see a grizzly bear?"

Daniel: Never "where can I see a garter snake?"

Gaby: [laughing]

Daniel: Yeah. All right, well, if people have more questions, they can, you know, hit us up on social media or email us here at the podcast.

Gaby: [email protected] [mellow beat begins to play]

Daniel: We'll put it in the show notes too. Our music's by Frank Waln and our art is by Stella Nall.

Gaby: They're both great. Check out their work.

Daniel: Info's in the show notes.

Gaby: Headwaters is made possible with support from our nonprofit partner, the Glacier National Park Conservancy. We absolutely could not be doing this without them. Check them out at glacier.org. If you have a moment to leave us a review in your podcast app, that helps so much.

Daniel: Thanks for listening. [music fades out]

A mini episode on the various ways to plan a trip to Glacier. Tune in to our next bonus episode where we'll answer listener-submitted questions on the show. Email your questions to [email protected] with the subject, "Headwaters." Glacier Conservancy: https://glacier.org/headwaters/ Frank Waln music: https://www.instagram.com/frankwaln/ Stella Nall art: https://stellanall.com/

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TRANSCRIPT:

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[drum and synth beat starts to play]

Lacy Kowalski: Headwaters is brought to you by the Glacier National Park Conservancy.

Daniel Lombardi: Hello. You're listening to Headwaters, a podcast from Glacier National Park. I'm Daniel.

Madeline Vinh: Hi, I'm Madeline.

[beat concludes]

Daniel: And the point of this show is to tell stories about how Glacier is connected to everything else.

Madeline: This bonus episode is a little different, though. It'll just be Daniel and I chatting about different resources and strategies for planning a trip to Glacier.

Daniel: We are talking trip tips.

Madeline: Trip tips.

Daniel: Trip tips.

Madeline: We are here in the park. We're here in Headquarters in West Glacier and the Park is pretty quiet right now. But the best time to plan for a trip to Glacier is well before you get here.

Daniel: Mhm.

Madeline: So, Daniel, what are some of the resources that you'd suggest people look into?

Daniel: Well, I think we have to start with official sources. Right? We have a website, nps.gov that stands for National Park Service dot government nps.gov/glac. "GLAC" is short for Glacier. That is your primary resource. That's going to have everything you need to plan a trip to the Park.

Madeline: Okay.

Daniel: Glacier maybe is a hard park to plan for because it's a big place. It's a complicated place, but there are a few other things I think people should know about.

Madeline: Officially or unofficially?

Daniel: Both.

Madeline: Okay.

Daniel: Officially, we have a podcast that's called Headwaters.

Madeline: What?

Daniel: You're listening to it right now. Also officially, we have social media channels. We're always Glacier NPS, whether it's on YouTube or Facebook or Instagram or Twitter or whatever. You can look us up. Follow us and that should help you plan a trip.

Madeline: Cool. Okay, so there are a lot of great sounding official resources but you've kind of hinted at unofficial resources. What do the unofficial resources have that the official ones don't?

Daniel: In general, I think people are sleeping on unofficial trip planning resources. So think of things like Facebook groups, YouTube channels, general blogs, books.

Madeline: Mhm.

Daniel: Let me back out and say that official resources are great. The Park website is going to have when campgrounds open and close. How much things cost? How far are distances between things? When are campfire programs? The park website has all of that stuff and you can trust it. It's a .gov website. You know you can trust nps.gov/glac, but if you're on a Facebook group, I think you shouldn't be expecting to get the facts and the dates and the numbers. You go to a Facebook group to get the opinionated, subjective, you know, human personal-.

Madeline: Mhm.

Daniel: -answers. Let me show you one on the laptop here, if I can get this to open up.

Madeline: Daniel is typing. He's using one finger at a time. He's typing aggressively. You might sometimes hear that.

Daniel: Sometimes I can use two fingers.

Madeline: But today is not one of those days.

Daniel: Okay, so I just went on Facebook and I searched Glacier National Park or National Parks. There are tons, dozens, maybe hundreds of Facebook groups. Gosh, yeah. And they are dedicated to helping people plan trips to national parks. It's an amazing resource that I don't think enough people know about.

Madeline: It sounds like thousands of people know about them.

Daniel: You, you got me there.

Madeline: But I'll compare that to the millions that visit national, national parks.

Daniel: Okay, so this group is it's a private Facebook group that anyone can request to join. It's called "National Park Trip Planning Advice and Help By The National Park Obsessed." And to give you an example of what it's like... Here's a post by Caitlin. Here, maybe I should have you read this.

Madeline: Caitlin says, "Just curious. In your opinion, what has been the hardest national park to plan? I've just started traveling to the parks and will hit my fifth this year, but so far for me, mine has been Glacier.".

Daniel: Ooh.

Madeline: Tough.

Daniel: I liked this one comment that someone responded to Caitlin with. Millie said Glacier was hardest for me, too, because quote, "because of the sheer number of amazing things to see and hikes to do, etc."

Madeline: You know, I don't hate that you can't go wrong here.

Daniel: Here's another unofficial source that I recommend people check out if they're if they're interested in this kind of thing. Go on YouTube. Type in Glacier National Park and look up travel vlogs. You're not going to get dates of campground opening closure, but just getting a visual look at what it's like in the park at a certain time of year, what it feels like to travel. It can be really helpful preparing you before you come visit.

Madeline: Just if you maybe want a little bit more of a visual. Sounds like vlogs are great.

Daniel: So here's a vlog from Nicole from last year. This is vlog "Video 13 Northern Montana and Glacier National Park Solo Female Traveler."

Madeline: Okay, so that's kind of like a POV, day in the life.

Daniel: Yeah, I love it. So this is one woman's experience visiting Glacier, traveling alone. You want to know what that's like okay. This person has already done it and recorded it, and you can get their opinion about it.

Nicole: So I just pulled over to see what the deal with reservations were for Glacier and-.

Madeline: Sounds great. People can look into those. Are there any hazards that people need to be aware of venturing into those territories?

Daniel: Any unofficial source you're using to plan a trip. I think you take it with a grain of salt. So if you're on a Facebook group and you're like reading the comments, it might be helpful. But also just, you know, keep some skepticism in your mind when you're reading through that kind of thing. Or if you're watching, you know, some random YouTube video about the park.

Madeline: Right. Okay. So it makes sense that that would be both a pro and a con. If you're looking for someone's opinion, sometimes you'll agree with that, sometimes you won't. So you still might need to have a little bit of a critical lens going in.

Daniel: Exactly.

Madeline: Okay.

Daniel: All right. Well, this has been just a little bonus episode. We are actively working on future seasons of the podcast, but they're not going to be coming out for a while. So stay tuned. Stay patient, stay subscribed, stay hydrated.

Madeline: All right. Headwaters is made possible with support from our nonprofit partner, the Glacier National Park Conservancy.

Daniel: You should check them out at their website. It's glacier dot org because they're our nonprofit partner. The Park's official website though nps.gov/glac.

[drum and synth beat starts to play]

Madeline: If you have a moment to leave us a review in your podcast app, we'd appreciate it. It helps a lot.

Daniel: Next time we're going to do a mailbag episode. So if you have any questions that you want the Headwaters team to answer on this podcast, just send us an email, put Headwaters in the subject line and our email address is [email protected]. We'll put it in the show notes too. Thanks for listening.

[beat fades out]

A conversation with Dr. Danielle Buttke, who works for the National Park Service at the intersection of human, wildlife, and environmental health. This episode was recorded in September 2023.

Glacier Conservancy: https://glacier.org/headwaters Frank Waln music: https://www.instagram.com/frankwaln/ Stella Nall art: https://www.instagram.com/stella.nall/

Climate change in Glacier: https://www.nps.gov/glac/learn/nature/climate-change.htm Public health in National Parks: https://www.nps.gov/orgs/1735/index.ht

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TRANSCRIPT:

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Lacy Kowalski: Headwaters is brought to you by the Glacier National Park Conservancy.

Peri Sasnett: This is Headwaters, a podcast made in the verdant wonderland that is Glacier National Park. Millions of people come here each year looking for a break from the stresses of everyday life. My name is Peri, and this episode is an interview that my co-host Daniel did with Dr. Danielle Buttke, talking about the intersection of climate change and public health. They talk about how the health of our climate, environment, and communities is all intertwined. This episode is part of a series of conversations we've been having with a wide variety of climate change experts. These episodes don't have to be listened to in any order, each one stands on its own. And they all focus on a particular aspect of the way the world is being altered by the burning of fossil fuels. Over the past century and a half, human activity has released enough greenhouse gases to warm the Earth's climate over one degree Celsius, with only more warming on the way. Throughout 2023, Daniel sat down with experts to talk about how that warming is altering Glacier National Park, our lives and our futures.

[drum and synth beat starts to play]

Peri: I've always been interested in the idea that people and nature are deeply connected. Maybe you know that already, if you listened to our season on whitebark pine. Still, I don't think I was prepared to hear Dr. Buttke explain these interconnections with so much scientific rigor. I was also struck by how profoundly our health is connected to our climate. I think this interview is essential listening.

[beat concludes]

Daniel Lombardi: So thanks for talking to us. We wanted to talk to you, Dr. Buttke, about public health and climate change and how climate change is impacting human health and the health of our natural environment, and how those two things are intertwined and all tangled up together.

Danielle Buttke: I'm excited to be here today.

Daniel: So you have an impressive background, right? You have a Master's in public health. You've studied environmental sciences, and you also have a degree in veterinary medicine, the health and epidemiology of animals. Is that kind of a good summary of that?

Danielle: It is, yeah. I had a little bit of a circuitous route to where I am today. Originally wanted to study and work in environmental science and wildlife conservation, which was where my, my Ph.D. work really focused, and realized somewhat early on that animals knew how to survive just fine. It was really that humans were, were taking over the resources and had basic needs that, that needed to be met before we could ask them to conserve resources for tomorrow. And that's when I switched to public health.

Daniel: So what's your job now? Tell us about where you work and what you do.

Danielle: So I currently lead the One Health program for the National Park Service, and One Health is simply the recognition that both human health, animal health and environmental health are all completely interdependent and interlinked. And when we think about the multiplicity of health outcomes and players, when we're looking at a specific problem, we all benefit when we think about health as a more holistic construct.

Daniel: A lot of times I think your job gets really kicked into high gear when like there's a hantavirus outbreak or something in a national park. Is that right?

Danielle: It is, yeah. Because we share so much of the same biology with other species, we often share a lot of the same diseases. Diseases that pass between humans and animals -- and they can often go in either direction -- SARS-CoV-2 or COVID is a perfect example of that, you know, they're called zoonotic diseases. And that's really where I got my start and where a lot of my work is focused, on those infectious diseases that can pass between humans and animals. Hantavirus is a perfect example of one of those. And so increasingly in our work, we're finding that when the environment is healthy, when we keep those ecosystems healthy, those ecosystem processes are occurring in the way that nature intended. We have many, many fewer disease risks and many, many fewer disease spillover events.

Daniel: Interesting. So I think one thing that's maybe surprising to some people, but talking with you, it seems pretty obvious, that like one approach to studying climate change or thinking about climate change is to think about it through a lens of public health, of environmental health. Do you encounter people that find that surprising, or that's a new idea for them. That these that climate change and environmental health and human health are connected.

Danielle: It's really surprising to me to hear and see how many people have not thought about that connection. In every aspect of the way in which climate change impacts the environment, has a similar impact on human health. And yet studies have shown that few people are aware of those impacts, even if they've personally been impacted by a climate disaster or climate emergency. Because when people understand climate change as an impact to their daily lives and their personal health and their family's health, I think it really helps people to understand why it's so important they take action. And it also helps to clarify the ways in which they can personally take action in their local community, in their home and the environment around them.

Daniel: Yeah. Do you think it's helpful for us to define the difference between health and disease?

Danielle: I think that Western medicine, and my own profession, has focused heavily on disease because it's really easy to see. It's very easy to measure. We have specific tests for specific diseases, and oftentimes it's it's something that we can directly treat. Health is a really difficult thing to measure. Health is not simply the absence of disease, but an individual's ability to thrive within the environment that they exist in, whether it's a human or an animal. And it's therefore a lot easier to understand why health is more directly impacted by climate change than disease per se. Even though we do know that climate change dramatically influences the rate, the types and the severity of infectious diseases. But again, health is much broader than just disease, and therefore the impacts of climate change are much broader than just disease.

[drumbeat plays, marking a transition]

Daniel: What are some examples of climate change really impacting wildlife health and wildlife disease that you've come across in your work?

Danielle: Climate change can influence the actual reproduction of a bacterium or a virus. Under warmer temperatures, or higher or sometimes even lower amounts of precipitation, certain bacteria and viruses can replicate faster, to a higher level, or for a longer period of time. Mosquito-borne viruses are a perfect example of this. When you have a longer, warmer summer, mosquitoes can replicate much more quickly and rapidly, they're present for a longer period of time throughout the year, and those viruses within those mosquitoes can also replicate more rapidly under those warming temperatures. We're also seeing that infectious diseases are changed under climate change because of the ways in which the environment influences where those animals thrive and survive. Avian malaria in Hawaii is a perfect example of this. While neither the mosquitoes nor the the parasite that causes malaria are native to Hawaii, they have become endemic in bird populations and in mosquito populations there. Prior to the warmer temperatures we've seen under climate change, a lot of the native bird species were able to only survive and evade malaria at very high elevations on the mountains in Hawaii. With climate change, those mosquito vectors are moving up in elevation, and those native bird species that are extremely susceptible to malaria, because they didn't evolve with this non-native parasite, are dying out from malaria. And as the mosquitoes move up, there's fewer and fewer refugia, or safe places, for those birds to survive and hide from both the mosquito and the malaria parasite. And we've seen a lot of those native birds go completely extinct because of this parasite. In fact, there's a variety of studies show that there's probably only a few more years left for some of these native bird species to survive without going extinct, if we don't take action now to eradicate that non-native mosquito and that non-native parasite that's present on the island.

Daniel: Wow. So basically, in the case of Hawaii and the birds there, it's a story of climate change and a story of invasive or non-native species in that the mosquitoes and the malaria is historically wasn't there. But this is -- generally, all around the world, what's happening is as the climate warms, these mosquitoes and the diseases they carry are able to spread into new places and impact more people and new species of wildlife as well. Is that right?

Danielle: That's absolutely correct.

Daniel: So we're seeing the potential for these mosquitoes to expand their ranges. Does their range contract alongside, too? As it gets hotter and hotter, they can move to higher elevations and farther north, but then does their the southern end or the lower end of their ranges shrink at the same time? Or are they able to tolerate the heat better?

Danielle: For for many species, absolutely. There is not necessarily an expansion of range. Oftentimes, it's just a shift in the range in which these organisms can survive. However, it's not just climate change that's happening on the landscape. It's also human development of landscapes. And humans create microclimates that are oftentimes much more conducive to having these parasites, whether it's ticks, mosquitoes, pathogens themselves, survive. So, for example, here in Colorado, on the Front Range, we have a lot of irrigation because people like green lawns, they like having trees that might not otherwise be able to live on this landscape. And when we have irrigation, we know we have dramatically increased rates of mosquito-borne disease, such as West Nile virus. And so we have, by altering the landscape, changed the way in which these pathogens can survive and interact. And you have kind of a one-two double whammy of that land-use change that's expanding the range, as well as those, those changes from climate change that are expanding the season under which these pathogens can thrive. But I want to be clear it's not always a unidirectional: more disease because of climate change. If we're seeing decreases in precipitation or longer periods of time between which we have rainfall events, that can impact the survival of of ticks. And so it's not always that climate change is causing more pathogens to occur on the landscape. And maybe in some circumstances that's causing them to contract their range or be present for a shorter period of time. But at the end of the day, humans and animals evolved under very specific, discrete conditions. And when we have more rapid and more unpredictable changes in weather and conditions, this means that we are more susceptible to diseases. And diseases are more able to opportunistically take advantage of new niches.

Daniel: What I'm hearing you say is that, yes, the shift in mosquitoes and disease, the shift in range and the lengthening of the season, those are concerning. But maybe something that's understated here then is that climate change is just increasing kind of the chaos in the system, and the complexity, which makes all of this just harder to manage.

Danielle: That's a perfect way to put it.

Daniel: Well, let's talk about the pika research, then. What's happening with pika and climate change and disease?

Danielle: So pika are amazing little creatures that have evolved to fill a very specific niche at these very high elevation sites. So a big study that we have going on now is to understand how climate change may be influencing the other small mammals that are moving up to those higher-elevation sites. Because they're seeing warmer temperatures up at those higher-elevation sites, they're able to survive and interact with new populations and they're often bringing their diseases with them. And indeed, there's previous studies that have found, you know, certain species of small mammal that are known to be impacted by plague and carry fleas that can very easily and readily transmit the plague bacterium. They are now found at higher elevation sites where pika are also found. So we're really interested in looking at how those warmer temperatures may be driving new species to interact with pika, and they may be bringing the diseases that could potentially kill pika with them.

Daniel: Wow. So if someone hasn't heard of pika before, pikas are these really cute little mammals that are related to rabbits. So they're not really like mouse-like, they're much cuter than that. Size of potatoes, they love to live under the rocks high in the mountains and then like store up flowers for the winter because they don't actually hibernate. They don't sleep through the winter, right? They just hide under the rocks and eat their hay pile all winter long.

Danielle: Yeah. An adorable squeaky potato is a great way to put it.

Daniel: [laughs] So to stay warm in the winter, they hide under, you know, heavy, deep snows. And that keeps it, you know, it doesn't really get a whole lot colder than freezing point -- than 32 degrees. The snow actually insulates them from the colder air blowing around at the tops of the mountains. But then if you have changes in the amount of snow you're getting, or how warm the winters are, you might get less snow. And that could really hurt their ability to survive through the winter. So that's the general climate impact facing pika. But now you're describing something much more nuanced and complicated, and that is all these other animals, squirrels and mice and all kinds of little creatures that that have fleas, that have potentially diseases. And they're moving up the mountains because it's getting warmer up there and it's nice. And so they're interacting with the pika more, potentially sharing diseases. Am I getting that relationship right?

Danielle: Exactly. And I think it also really highlights what we talked about earlier, that interplay between health and disease. It's not just about whether or not a disease is present, it's how healthy is that population to begin with? How resilient is it to changes in its environment, in the introduction to new diseases? When you both have the loss of snowpack happening, as well as the introduction of a new disease, you're much more likely to see declines in that population because they don't have that resilience.

Daniel: So it's like, yeah, bringing some new diseases into a population of pikas isn't great, but so long -- if they're really healthy, then maybe that's not a big deal. But if they're really stressed and not very healthy because they've been freezing all winter long and really struggling, well then disease is going to hit a lot harder when it shows up.

Danielle: It's sometimes even native diseases that these populations may have evolved to handle or withstand the impacts of these diseases under normal conditions. But maybe under the land use changes that humans are causing, combined with climate change, those native diseases that they've previously evolved some sort of equilibrium or balance with are now having really detrimental impacts.

[drumbeat plays to mark a transition]

Daniel: Well, let's shift a little bit and talk about some of the impacts of climate change on human health that are a little, a little different than what we've been talking about. One of the primary examples is that well, burning fossil fuels like driving a car or running a coal power plant, that produces, in addition to greenhouse gases which are warming the climate, it's also producing air pollution, which has a big impact on human health. And I'm wondering if you could kind of lay that out a little bit. How does just the use of fossil fuels, aside from causing climate change, how does that impact human health?

Danielle: I don't think we can state strongly enough the negative impact of fossil fuel combustion on human health. Because that pollution that's created, we're directly breathing it, because it's often created in the communities in which we live. It's our actions -- driving our car to work, heating our homes, transporting the food that we eat to the grocery store -- all of those things are happening in the places that we live and work, and therefore we're directly exposed to a lot of this pollution. It's estimated that the combustion of fossil fuels and the resulting air pollution is responsible for anywhere from 8 to 10 million deaths every single year. That is more than AIDS, malaria, and tuberculosis kills -- combined -- every single year. And so it's really easy to make the business case for for clean energy, for for stopping climate change, because even if we're only looking at the direct health impacts of fossil fuel combustion, we can pay for clean energy. We can pay for that transition away from fossil fuels, away from combustion engines, just from the health care savings that we see. By stopping all of those premature deaths, it's decreasing our lifespans. No matter where you live and who you are. Although obviously individuals that live in more polluted communities, which unfortunately is often disadvantaged populations, whether it's people that live in rural parts of the country, people of color, people with lower income, those people obviously you see the brunt of it to a greater extent than more privileged communities. But even people in privileged communities are dying at much faster rates because of exposure to air pollution. It can get very deep into our lungs and it can cross into our bloodstream where our blood is pumped throughout our body. And those little tiny particles of pollution get lodged in our tissues. One of the most direct impacts is when it's lodged in our brain where it can cause a stroke or it leads to dementia. We see much higher rates of dementia in communities with higher rates of pollution. Or it can be in your heart or your blood vessels and it can lead to a heart attack or other types of cardiovascular disease. And so you've certainly met someone, know someone, have personally been impacted by stroke, heart attack, cardiovascular disease. All of those diseases are much worse and much more common because of fossil fuel combustion, because of our exposure to air pollution. And that's really just the start. There's a myriad of other ways in which that burning of fossil fuels impacts our health, but those are the most obvious.

Daniel: Wow. So if someone you know has a stroke, the medical report probably isn't going to say anything about air pollution because we're just not looking into the details that carefully anytime someone has a stroke. You know, we're just trying to help them get better and recover. But in reality, the air pollution is contributing at least some amount to that likelihood of a stroke happening.

Danielle: Absolutely. It's, you know, similar to the interplay of health and disease, we focus on that end result, that stroke. We focus on that disease, but we're not thinking enough about all of those factors that caused that stroke to occur in the first place. And exposure to pollution is is a really, really important one. There was, however, recently one of the first death certificates that had climate change listed. It was in, an I believe, a young person who had died from an asthma attack. And asthma is a much more direct, much more obvious way in which climate change and the burning of fossil fuels impacts our health. But there's there's many less obvious ways and many more insidious ways than simply dying from an asthma attack.

Daniel: It's difficult to parse out how much worse their particular case of asthma is because of burning fossil fuels. But it's certainly exacerbating and worsening these breathing and lung conditions that people might already have or might not already have.

Danielle: And it's not just direct exposure to fossil fuel combustion. It's also those secondary impacts of burning fossil fuels. So under these warmer temperatures, we know that wildfire is dramatically increasing. You know, and the the particles that are released during a wildfire event are having that secondary and compounding impact on increasing rates of asthma, increasing hospital admissions, increasing stroke, increasing heart attack. So it's oftentimes multifactorial, but increasingly, those events are linked to impacts of climate change. We know that, you know, somewhat surprisingly, increased precipitation from climate change in some parts of the country are increasing pollen counts and worsening asthma and other types of air pollution, whereas in other parts of the country, such as the desert southwest, those increased droughts and increased temperatures are worsening the dust, sometimes worsening fungal pollen spores that can cause different infectious diseases such as Valley Fever and worsening the rates of asthma, the rates of of general lung disease and other impacts because of those warmer temperatures.

Daniel: So here in Glacier, what what's probably happening is we're getting longer summers, warmer summers. So there's allergy season in the summer and the season in which plants are pollinating. Like that's lengthening, too. So if you're allergic to tree pollen, like when there's just longer time periods with that pollen in the air.

Danielle: These are oftentimes synergistic, especially when you have warmer temperatures. When the body is overheated, when we have higher, hotter ambient temperatures, it's a lot harder for our body to respond to especially those cardiovascular insults. We see much higher rates of cardiovascular disease and cardiovascular attacks when you have these compound exposures. So it is, as you said earlier, it's just increased chaos.

Daniel: Yeah, increased chaos because it's one thing if your allergies are way worse because of the pollen or your asthma is way worse because of the smoke. But then you have to add on top of that, like, oh, also a heat wave and you don't have air conditioning. Like now you're suddenly really susceptible to like just a common cold, I would think is going to hit way harder when your body is run down from heat and smoke and everything.

Danielle: And we saw this with COVID. We saw that populations that were experiencing greater amounts of air pollution had much more severe rates of COVID-19 disease and death. We know that when your body is responding to pollution and responding to particulate matter, it's much more difficult to fight off infectious diseases, even things such as as seemingly benign as the common cold.

Daniel: Wow. Well, let's talk about the heat, then, because ultimately, that's what we most typically associated with climate change, is burning fossil fuels, is releasing greenhouse gases, and that's heating the planet. And heat is ultimately very dangerous.

Danielle: Most folks are often surprised to hear and learn that heat kills more people than any other severe weather event. And it isn't just direct heat exposure, just as it isn't direct fossil fuel pollution exposure that kills people. Repeated exposure to high temperatures in which your body's not able to cool itself well can cause a lot of long term health impacts. It can decrease kidney function. There's some studies suggesting it may influence the development of other chronic diseases, such as diabetes. It can have long term impacts on your cardiovascular system, and it can influence your ability to withstand those severe heat events in future years. And so it's not just simply did you survive that extreme heat event that you saw. It's what long term consequences are occurring to your body when when you have these, these heat exposure in these extreme heat events.

Daniel: There's two themes emerging in this conversation so far, Danielle. One of them is that the impacts of climate change on health are not evenly distributed. They're impacting some people more than others. Another theme that's emerging, that if it's not obvious already, is that none of these impacts are acting alone. They're all interacting together and exacerbating and influencing each other. Well, I want to ask you something more about heat. In Phoenix this summer, they had like almost the entire month of July over 110 degrees Fahrenheit. And that's incredible. Glacier National Park here in West Glacier, I think our record high temperature ever is 100 degrees Fahrenheit. So it's just it doesn't get that hot here. But I'm guessing that you can say more about how it's not necessarily the number that causes health issues. It's not the exact temperature. There's other factors, right?

Danielle: It is often unexpected heat that causes the worst health impacts and outcomes because people are neither behaviorally able to adapt -- maybe you didn't bring sun protection, maybe you didn't plan your hike so that you can take shade breaks, maybe you didn't bring enough water -- as well as physiologically adapt. When your body is gradually exposed to increasing heat, it's able to cool itself more efficiently over time, provided that it has the resources that needed it needs. So it's unexpected heat that's oftentimes the greatest killer. But what our study found was where we had the most severe health impacts and the most number of heat illness events and deaths was in the shoulder seasons. It's when people didn't expect the heat that they suffered the worst.

[drumbeat plays to mark a transition]

Daniel: So far, we've talked about impacts of climate change on wildlife health and disease. And we've talked about the impacts of climate change on human health and disease. And now I was going to ask you, let's talk more about where those overlap and intersect, how human and wildlife and environmental health are really inseparable and tied together. Do you think the best examples might be like Lyme disease, hantavirus, West Nile? Should we talk about those?

Danielle: I think those are some of the the most salient examples of how human, environmental and wildlife health are interlinked. However, they're not the most powerful examples in terms of overall health benefits or overall health detriments. Lyme disease and West Nile and hantavirus are all infectious diseases that can be spread from wildlife and or insects to humans, and oftentimes vice versa. And we know that each of these diseases occurs at higher rates and spills over to humans more often when there are aspects of that environment that aren't healthy. We know, for example, West Nile virus occurs at the highest rates in the human population when there are the least number of bird species present and when there is not a very diverse community of wildlife present. It's something that's been referred to as the dilution effect, although that simplifies it quite a bit. It's much more complex than that. But it's the idea that when you have diverse wildlife populations that are present in healthy ecosystems, they essentially can dilute out that disease because they're not all susceptible to it, and therefore it can't simply amplify by passing from one animal to the next to the next. And that means that when you don't have that complete community of birds present, when you don't have that diverse assemblage of wildlife species present, you can see greater rates of some of these diseases. Lyme disease is another example of that. We know that when you have more predators present on the landscape, you have lower numbers and lower rates of transmission in the mouse populations, either because those predators are eating that mouse species that is uniquely capable of maintaining high numbers of the Lyme disease-causing bacteria, or oftentimes because those mice aren't as often to go out there and transmit disease more readily because they're afraid that a predator is watching them. And that's why when we have more natural predators present, when we have a more diverse wildlife community present on the landscape, we have lower rates of Lyme disease in those human communities and that part of of the environment. Wow. So we know that when that ecosystem is diverse and healthy, we generally have lower rates of disease transmission.

Daniel: That's really amazing. To underline that, you're saying that more biodiversity results in less disease for wildlife and people.

Danielle: For many diseases yes, that is -- and generally that is the case.

Daniel: Wow. Can we dig into each of these a little bit then? What is it about having more birds that helps with West Nile disease?

Danielle: Yeah, this is a great question and a really important example of this mechanism of of how biodiversity protects us. There are certain bird species that are really susceptible to West Nile virus, and those bird species can make a whole lot of virus in their bloodstream when they get infected. Corvids, which are things like jays and crows, are examples of birds that that make a whole lot of virus when they get infected. And that's oftentimes why they die from West Nile virus. But before they die, they can infect a lot of mosquitoes, because every single time a mosquito takes blood from that animal, they can pick up a ton of virus because it's at such high density in the blood of that bird species. Compare that to other types of songbirds that are probably more rare, probably don't like living around humans to the same extent that those corvids species do. They may get infected with West Nile virus, but they're much less likely to die from it, and they don't make as much virus when they have it or they never get it in the first place. So when you have those songbirds present that aren't very capable at transmitting West Nile virus, you essentially stop those mosquitoes from feeding on those those jays and those crows and those other species that are really good at transmitting it. And therefore, a fewer percentage of the mosquitoes in that population are going to be transmitting and carrying West Nile virus. The thing is, those species that are really good at transmitting West Nile virus are some of the most resilient to human disturbance. That's why those are the birds you see in neighborhoods, because those are some of the only ones that are tolerant of night lighting that occurs oftentimes in human developments or the noises that occur or the very, very impoverished numbers of trees and diversity of of plant species. A lot of those songbirds need more food than is present in an urban landscape, and therefore they can't live there. And so that's why having more bird species present, as we see in more diverse communities, is associated with having fewer human infections with West Nile virus.

Daniel: This is kind of blowing my mind. And so when we're talking about these diseases and the overlap between wildlife health and biodiversity and human health and human disease, the climate impact is not quite as direct as some of the other things we've talked about, but it's still a factor in that climate change is disrupting the life patterns and the existence of a bunch of these animals and changing the amount of like generalist species, like ravens versus sensitive warbler species that are being impacted by climate change, am I understanding that. Right?

Danielle: Absolutely. And I think it's probably easier to see climate impacts in these wildlife diseases and populations if instead of looking at the negative side of things, we look at the positive side of things because we know that when you have more tree canopy present in a location that's supposed to be forested, you have much greater rates of biodiversity. So more species of birds present, so less or lower rates of West Nile virus transmission occurring there. And you're more resilient against heat illness because you've got shade there, you have evapotranspiration happening from those trees. So they create cooler, more humid micro environments that help your body cool and all of those other species that are just as susceptible to heat illness oftentimes as humans are. It cleans the water. It means you're more you're less susceptible to flooding because the roots of those trees will take that water away. It regulates our environment in so many ways that it both decreases the risk of a lot of these infectious diseases, as well as protects us from severe heat, extreme weather, extreme flooding, drought, etc.. And so, you know, it's it's not just, again, about disease. It's it's really about health writ large.

Daniel: At the end of the day, those diseases are not our greatest killers. They don't have the greatest health impacts. And other infectious diseases where biodiversity can regulate or reduce the rate of disease transmission may have be more important from a number standpoint, even if the example by which biodiversity regulates disease transmission isn't as obvious.

Daniel: Are you saying that, well, hantavirus, Lyme disease, this is kind of scary, but ultimately, like from a public health perspective, asthma, and air quality, that kind of stuff is just way more impactful. Way more important.

Danielle: Exactly. Exactly. When you look at the top ten killers, not just in the United States, but globally, they're not infectious diseases. They're chronic diseases, they're cancer. They're diseases from air pollution. They're, you know, factors and health impacts that are influenced both by climate change increasingly, as well as access to nature. [drumbeat plays to mark a transition]

Daniel: So you're describing the health and disease benefits of basically just having more greenspace, having more trees and grass around where you live. Right.

Danielle: Most people can probably think about the way in which being outside might make you feel better. It's not just a feeling. We know that when you are exposed to nature, even if it's in short periods of time, very small segments or what we would think of as not very natural nature, such as a dense city park or even house plants, it can have really profound physiologic impacts that last for quite a long time on us. We know that kids that are exposed to nature, if they walk through a tree lined street on their way to school, they're going to concentrate better. They have better immune function, they have better recall and memory and and better behavioral characteristics. There are studies that have found that kids that are exposed to nature on a regular basis can sometimes even eliminate the need for medication to deal with things such as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, attention deficit disorder, simply from exposure to nature. We also know that we have significant increases in, for example, natural killer cell function and other immune markers when we are exposed to some of the phytochemicals that trees release, or simply exposed to greenspace, our immune system is better able to deal with pollution as well as infectious diseases when we're exposed to nature. We also know that there's a lot of mental health benefits, not just memory and mental function, but also decreased rates of anxiety, depression, lower rates of crime in communities that have green space present. And all of these is really has been found to be a direct measure or impact of of the presence of nature, even when we control for things such as socioeconomic conditions present in that environment, other other factors that can influence any of these outcomes. You know, regardless of of what your background is or where you live, there's a health impact of nature exposure that we can see if we're increasing the amount of nature you're exposed to.

Daniel: Wow.

Danielle: Yeah. And I think this is really important because while diseases such as West Nile virus, hantavirus, Lyme disease are important, they actually don't kill that many people. They can have a devastating impact on your life if you have some of those long term sequelae of Lyme disease infection. But in reality, the impacts of those diseases pale in comparison with a lot of the chronic diseases such as depression, such as substance abuse, such as suicide, such as cardiovascular disease and cancer, these chronic diseases that kill far more people than those infectious diseases. But those chronic diseases that can be alleviated, if not completely cured or prevented if we have more nature present in our environment and if we have access to nature. We know that people are more likely to participate in healthy behaviors when they have more nature present in their community and environment. We know that people are more likely to be connected to others and their community when they have more greenspace present. And that dramatically increases life span and lessens your risk of dying from any type of extreme event, severe weather, emergency fire or otherwise. Because people are going to check on you. You're less likely to die of diseases of despair such as alcoholism, drug use disorder, and other forms of of mental illness deaths when you have exposure to nature and a stronger, more closer knit community. And so it really influences and improves our health in a variety of ways. Those impacts are much harder to measure than diseases from infectious causes, but they're no less real. Just because we maybe can't can't measure them in the same way.

Daniel: And so oftentimes, like defining what is nature is messy or complicated, but in this case, we're like really loosely defining it, I think, right. Like it's we're talking about just having grass and trees and plants around you. That's what you mean by exposure to nature for the most part. Right?

Danielle: Yeah. And in fact, one of the first seminal studies showing this effect simply looked at whether or not hospital patients recovering from gallbladder surgery could see nature outside of their window, or if they were on a side of the hospital that looked out at other buildings. And they found much faster rates of recovery and better outcomes in those patients who had views of trees outside of their hospital window. And so there hasn't been that much work done to really quantify what types of nature have what types of impact. But the good news is the bar is pretty low. Any nature, whether it's native or not or pristine or not or large or small, is going to have some positive benefit on your mental health, on your physical health, and your community health, and your chance of living longer and healthier and happier. And studies that look at infectious disease, studies that look at chronic disease, studies that look at school performance, anxiety, the list goes on and on. And the other thing that's really important about this is a lot of these diseases are impacted by climate change, but a lot of the benefits of nature go beyond some of the things we've just talked about to, again, reducing your risk of extreme heat, reducing your exposure to air pollution. Trees are one of the best sources of of air filters, right? Trees clean our air to a greater extent than nearly any other type of technology, and trees draw down carbon. They both help us adapt to climate change as well as help to reverse or stop some of the climate warming pollution, pull it down back into the ground so that we're not still seeing the heating impact of that carbon that's in the air. So nature is is so beneficial on so many so many levels. And climate change is really compounding a lot of these diseases that we're exposed to, a lot of these health impacts that we're exposed to. But access to nature can both have a direct impact on our risk of those diseases, as well as reverse or mitigate some of our future risk by by helping us adapt to and mitigate climate change directly.

Daniel: And to be clear, you're not talking about like some special whitebark pine tree in the top of a national park. You're talking about literally any tree is improving our air quality and health while also drawing down carbon along the way.

Danielle: Yes. And this is actually a really important point because the tree that's going to have the greatest influence on your health is the one that's closest to you. But it's local nature that has the greatest health impact because you have the greatest exposure to it. It doesn't have to be large scale. It doesn't have to be as big or beautiful as you'd like it to be. Any nature is going to have a positive health benefit for you if you're exposed to it at a higher rate.

Daniel: Not everybody has the same access to a neighborhood filled with trees and streets lined with trees. Some neighborhoods have more than others.

Danielle: And this is why those health impacts of climate change fall very unequally on communities and hit those vulnerable communities with the least resources. Most significantly, because those communities are less likely to have tree canopy, you're both less likely to have the money or the housing for air conditioning or well sealed housing that can keep that wildfire smoke out, and you're less likely to have tree canopy that's going to clean up that pollution that's there or shade your house so that you're less impacted by the lack of air conditioning during a heat wave. Greenspace is one way in which we can dramatically improve the health of those vulnerable communities, because there's both the really, really beneficial health aspects of having that exposure to greenspace, as well as that really significant need to help them adapt to warmer temperatures, to more air pollution, to more diseases present, to more flooding, to more drought. Trees are going to help with all of those things, and they're beneficial whether or not you're experiencing one of those extreme weather events.

Daniel: So altogether, it's like kind of scary to really realize like how unhealthy and how negatively our environment is being impacted by climate change. But it's also kind of inspiring or exciting that like there's so many benefits to our health from fostering a healthy environment and addressing climate change. That like we have the solutions and those solutions for a lot of these is just like engaging with and encouraging more greenspace in your own neighborhood.

Danielle: And even better, if they could be a food source to you or to to local wildlife, which you know is another impact of climate change we haven't talked about is food scarcity and food insecurity, because we're having more droughts and heat waves and greater chaos. You can't grow crops very well if you don't know whether or not the rain is going to come or how hot that temperature is going to be that summer. And so having more nature present and more types of nature present is going to make you more adaptable and more resilient. And the other really important aspect of having more nature present is that it is one of the only things that the American public universally supports. It does not matter your political views, your economic background, your your ethnic background, everyone universally, over 93% of Americans support protecting more greenspace, whether it's national parks or otherwise, for the benefit and well-being of other Americans. And so it's something we can all get behind as as a climate solution, as an equity solution, as a health solution of having more greenspace present. And if we use that greenspace to to also then, you know, grow local food or have more educational opportunities for kids or have more spaces for us to connect with each other, we're going to see a myriad of other health benefits and resilience benefits against some of these climate changes in the future.

Daniel: Well, this is all been incredible. Thank you, Dr. Buttke, for taking the time to come and chat with us about this.

Danielle: Thank you for the time. But at the end of the day, the the story is is really one of hope and and nature, the health benefits of nature. The best way for you to have an impact. The best way for you to take climate action is right where you are, influencing the people that will listen to you most readily and most willingly and in the way in which you you best know how. Any action you can take is going to be beneficial, but it's going to be most beneficial if it's it's local to you and in with people that that trust and are more likely to follow in your footsteps. And again, everyone supports more nature. Everyone supports more green space. So it's a really good place to start.

Daniel: We have so much to gain by addressing climate change. I love that.

Danielle: It's important to recognize that there's extreme disparity in this country in particular, and access to greenspace and access to shade and access to parks. And it's not simply about what zip code you live in and whether or not you have money to take that vacation and travel to to a national park. It's more about the ways in which our cities were designed and developed that excluded people of color, in particular from living in certain neighborhoods and parts of certain cities because of institutional and structural racism that existed. We know that the practice of redlining prohibited people of color from owning homes in certain parts of the city that were more likely to have greenspace and parks present. And that's why today, one of the thing that predicts your likelihood of having shade or having urban tree canopy or access to green space is sadly the color of your skin. This is a an absolute health disparity in addition to just simply being wrong that we really need to to to remedy not only because it's the right thing to do, but because it has dramatic health benefits and it helps those vulnerable communities adapt to and mitigate climate change in a way that they need it most.

Daniel: So, Danielle, some of what you're describing is the benefits of green space, not just on human health and mitigating human disease, but also just improving like mental health to being in green space. And I'm also curious to see what you think about the benefits of mental health, of like taking action, doing something in your community about green space or about climate change. Like, does that have an impact on mental health or any other kind of health?

Danielle: I think oftentimes we think about it backwards. It isn't that if you have hope, you take action. It's that if you take action that brings you hope. Taking action actually dramatically improves your mental health. And oftentimes people don't know where to start or where to act. The good news is, is that anything you can do in your neighborhood is going to have the biggest impact. And any action you're taking in your local, local neighborhood or community is also more likely to have that positive impact on your health. If you're advocating for a park, if you're planting trees, if you're starting a community garden, we are going to have so much more hope when we take action and we're going to have such a greater impact when we do it through nature based solutions, because they have health benefits that extend far beyond the direct impact on climate and health benefits or impacts. We are increasingly dependent on our local communities to meet our needs, to take care of each other, to support each other through these extreme weather events and these climate impacts and action that we can take, such as improving greenspace locally, is going to make our community more prepared for these events. It's going to provide us a resource that helps mitigate and reduce the impacts of those severe events. And it's just going to make us healthier, happier and more resilient long term. So it's it's really, I think one of the best ways for us to find hope is by taking action to find those nature based solutions where you live and work, because they'll have the greatest impact and you'll see those benefits quite clearly.

[hopeful guitar and drumbeat plays]

Daniel: Yeah, that's great. We have so much to gain by taking action to address climate change from creating more greenspace. I love it.

Peri: Headwaters is funded by donations to the Glacier National Park Conservancy. As an organization dedicated to supporting the park, the Conservancy funds a lot of sustainability initiatives from solar panels on park buildings to storytelling projects like this one. The Conservancy is doing critical work to prevent the worst impacts of climate change. You can learn more about what they do and about how to get involved at Glacier.org. This show is created by Daniel Lombardi, Michael Faist, Gaby Eseverri, and me, Peri Sasnett. We get critical support from Lacy Kowalski, Melissa Sladek, Kristen Friesen, and so many good people with Glacier's, natural and cultural resource teams. Our music was made by the brilliant Frank Waln, and the show's cover art is by our sweet friend Stella Nall. Check out Frank and Stella's work at the links in the show notes. Besides sharing this episode with a friend who might appreciate it, you can help us out by leaving a rating and review in your podcast app. Thanks for listening.

[music concludes]

A conversation with Elizabeth Villano, from the NPS Climate Change Response Program, about telling climate stories and finding hope. This episode was recorded in June of 2023.

Glacier Conservancy: https://glacier.org/headwaters Frank Waln music: https://www.instagram.com/frankwaln/ Stella Nall art: https://www.instagram.com/stella.nall/

Climate change in Glacier: https://www.nps.gov/glac/learn/nature/climate-change.htm Climate change across the NPS: https://www.nps.gov/subjects/climatechange/index.htm

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TRANSCRIPT:

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Lacy Kowalski: Headwaters is brought to you by the Glacier National Park Conservancy. You're listening to Headwaters, a show from Glacier National Park.

Peri Sasnett: Glacier is usually thought of as a nature park, but it's also steeped in human culture and history dating back thousands of years. My name is Peri, and this episode is an interview with climate change interpreter and park ranger Elizabeth Villano. She talks about how climate change isn't just a nature or science story, but is also a history and culture story, and about how national parks and historic sites across the country can lead that conversation. This episode is part of a series of conversations we've been having with a wide variety of climate change experts. These episodes don't have to be listened to in any order, each one stands on its own. And they all focus on a particular aspect of the way the world is being altered by the burning of fossil fuels. Over the past century and a half, human activity has released enough greenhouse gases to warm the Earth's climate over one degree Celsius, with only more warming on the way. Throughout 2023, Daniel sat down with experts to talk about how that warming is altering Glacier National Park, our lives and our futures. [drum and synth beat starts to play] This is an interview that surprised me. Each turn in the conversation went in directions I didn't expect. I've always known that climate change is a big story that connects to pretty much everything, but I'd never heard it explored this fully. If you enjoy visiting national parks, or especially if you like going to ranger programs, this conversation is for you.

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Daniel Lombardi: Elizabeth, welcome to headquarters.

Elizabeth Villano: Thanks so much, Daniel. It's great to be here.

Daniel: Will you introduce yourself? Where do you work?

Elizabeth: I work for the Climate Change Response Program, which is the centralized unit within the National Park Service that does climate change communication, resilience, adaptation work for all of the National Park Service sites.

Daniel: And before that, you worked for a bunch of national park sites in the San Francisco Bay Area, right?

Elizabeth: Yeah, I worked at Alcatraz Island, the Marin Headlands, Muir Woods, and Rosie the Riveter World War Two Home Front National Historical Park.

Daniel: Okay, so you're you are a park ranger wearing the flat hat, talking to the public, talking about trees, talking about the history of World War Two, talking about all kinds of stuff.

Elizabeth: And federal prisons.

Daniel: Okay. And now you're working with all the national parks around the country, four hundred-some of them. And you're helping them incorporate climate change into what they're already doing?

Elizabeth: Yeah, I think at last count, there was 424 National Park Service sites across the country.

Daniel: Okay.

Elizabeth: And all of those interpreters have a really important job of engaging the public with their site specifically. Mm hmm. And so I am kind of in the next step up from that, where I help create training materials and actually facilitate and lead trainings that help those interpreters find their own site connection to climate change.

Daniel: Is there a park site that isn't connected to climate change?

Elizabeth: Definitely not.

Daniel: And that is exactly why I wanted to talk to you. We're having this whole series of conversations about climate change in the national parks. And I wanted to talk to you because you are talking to all these other national parks, talking about how climate change is connected to everything we do, including historical and cultural park sites. It's not just about the big nature parks like Glacier.

Elizabeth: Yeah, exactly. And in those big nature parks like Glacier, finding the unexpected connections that sometimes create the deeper meanings for visitors.

Daniel: So there for sure wasn't any like, you know, "aha" wake up moment for you on climate change. Like what underpins, you know, what's your motivation? Why do you want to tell climate stories at all?

Elizabeth: So the mission of the National Park Service is to preserve these places that we're in unimpaired for future generations. Mm hmm. And a lot of people understand when we say things like, don't feed the bears, right? That's not an unimpaired state. That is humans feeding bears. Mm hmm. They understand when we say don't throw litter on the ground. Right. Because that's not unimpaired. If we really want to stay true to our mission statement, then we absolutely have to talk about here's ways that we can reduce our carbon footprint so that these places remain unimpaired for future generations, for people to continue enjoying these beautiful places that we love and cherish so much. That's just another form of advocacy that we absolutely need to do.

Daniel: Especially in a place like Glacier that's so easy to see. And such an important point you're making is that. Climate change is impacting and changing in a negative way. Glacier National Park. And we have to acknowledge that and we have to explore it. We have to talk about it. We have to tell the climate stories of Glacier National Park and of all the other park sites as well.

Elizabeth: Mm hmm. Yeah. Even if your park site doesn't have a glacier to melt or, you know, a sea level rise that will destroy your resource, you're still a part of this larger interconnected system across the nation where if we are protecting the National Park Services resources, you're a part of that movement. So part of my work is developing training tools so that anyone across the Park Service can say, How do I talk about climate change more effectively? And then the other part of that is actually leading and facilitating trainings.

Daniel: And that's one of the reasons I wanted to talk to you, is because I know you're working on a a big resource, a big toolkit called History and Hope, which is a tool that's going to help more national parks, especially national historical parks, talk about climate change and talk about climate change in places that maybe they haven't a lot in the past. Is that right?

Elizabeth: Yeah. The full title is History and Hope: Interpreting the Roots of Our Climate Crisis and Inspiring Action.

Daniel: Okay. I'm I'm really excited to talk to you today. And I want to talk to you about how the national parks can interpret climate change into the future. Maybe a new approach to talking about climate change that's different than what we've done in the past. But let's start with you a little bit. Did you have a moment or a turning point where you started thinking about climate change a lot more or differently?

Elizabeth: Well, you know, I was thinking about if I had a wake up moment in thinking about climate change as a whole, and I realized the answer is no. It's just been a part of my consciousness since I can remember. Mm hmm. And I think that unfortunately, that's just how the trajectory of climate change, knowledge and understanding is going to go. And as you talk with people who are younger than me, especially, there's no wake up moment. It's yeah, I was born into a world that is increasingly in hospitable and is going to change in ways that we can't imagine or comprehend. Mm hmm.

Daniel: You could imagine a climate scientist 30 years ago or something, and they do some experiments or finally read some new research, and they have this wake up moment. But for people, for millennials, for Gen Z, for younger people, there's not moments like that. It's sort of you learn about it before you really understand it. And it's just climate change is kind of an ever present thing. Is that what I mean? That's how it feels for me too.

Elizabeth: Yeah, absolutely. It's just a part of how I view the world. Any time I'm in the outdoors, it's always kind of there in the back of my mind. And I think a part of my journey with the Park Service was figuring out, okay, we have this massive systemic issue and we're only really talking about it in spaces we think of as natural. But of course, this problem is so much bigger than just in natural spaces. Mm hmm. So how do we use park service sites that are more than just natural? All the cultural history embedded into them to help us think through those really challenging issues with climate change?

Daniel: Yeah. Why? Why And how do you think National Park sites, whether they're cultural or historical or natural, like why are park sites so well-suited for communicating climate change?

Elizabeth: I think first I've noticed in myself and other Park Service interpreters that we kind of hold a false binary of what's natural and what's cultural. Mm hmm. We say, like, this park is natural. There's glaciers, there's trees, there's rocks. And this park is cultural. It talks about wars and World War Two. And yeah, every park site has all of it.

Daniel: Like Glacier National Park is known as a natural park. We have grizzly bears. We have glaciers. Right. But of course, there's a lot of cultural and history here. And I imagine in the same way a site like Rosie the Riveter, you know, that's interpreting World War Two history, it's really a culture site. But of course, it is also part of the natural world and about the natural environment. So they're connected. But beyond that, there's something about like place based learning. And when you go to a place, it helps you learn about something like climate change in a different way. I think national parks as a whole are getting, you know, 300 some million visitors were really trusted and park rangers are really trusted. A. Authorities. It makes something so important like climate change, it makes it really important to talk about at such important places like National Park sites, I think. Do you agree?

Elizabeth: Yeah. And when people come to these sites, they're kind of in a different state of mind. Mm hmm. You know, they're on vacation mode. They're more open to learning, receiving information and feel really connected to the place that they're in. Mm hmm. National parks have such an immense power of place, it can kind of transport you into a different way of viewing the world. Yeah. And not just that. I think if you think about who the nation's storytellers are. Mm hmm. We're kind of the only agency or one of the only agencies that's employed to tell stories of our nation's past, as well as a trained workforce who understands how to dig into these histories and help people find their relevance with them. You'll often hear interpreters or the phrase interpretation. Mm hmm. And I used to get a lot like, What does that mean? Mm hmm. I'm not a language interpreter. I don't translate French to English, but I do interpret why this place matters to you and what helps you find your relevance to it. And so that was really the purpose of this project. And this toolkit is finding more ways we can interpret climate change so that we can say, here's a connection in this park site that maybe relates back to your own life more, that relates back to the qualities of being a person existing in a really messy world.

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Daniel: How did you start out talking about climate change when you were interpreting to the public? When people ask you about climate change, how how did you approach the topic with people?

Elizabeth: It was pretty dark, really.

Daniel: I think it was the same for me.

Elizabeth: I was working at Muir Woods National Monument, which is a beautiful redwood forest about an hour north of San Francisco, and the fog in and around the Bay Area is decreasing. It's decreased by about 30% since the 1950s. And the redwoods rely on the fog. Uh, so at the end of my talk, I would kind of, you know, the crescendo would be the fog is disappearing. And what is that going to mean for these trees? And I think, you know, I would just leave these really uncomfortably long pauses where I would start imagining the worst and people would start imagining the worst.

Daniel: Mm hmm.

Elizabeth: And I think the the underlying tone of what I was saying is, I'm so glad you're here now because they're not going to be here anymore. Mm hmm. And. When you're engaging with people, when you're doing programs, it's so energizing usually. And I would just leave these programs feeling so depleted and sad and depressed. And we've seen that people who are interpreting climate change, people who are doing the science of climate change, are really starting to feel depressed and worn down because we're so immersed in this topic that feels really hopeless.

Daniel: Yeah, I think you know that That's exactly how I approached interpreting and talking to the public about climate change when I first started as well. I was, you know, I'm not afraid of scary stories. I like the the doom side of things. I definitely early on focused on climate impacts. You know, climate change is causing wildfire to increase. It's causing the glaciers to melt. And here's how these animals are impacted and this is how much hotter it is. And, you know, telling kind of the the heavy impact side of the story, that was definitely the way I went at it. And I don't know that, you know, I would think that that half is important. You have to recognize that. But it definitely feels like there's something missing.

Elizabeth: Yeah. I mean, did you feel hopeful when you talked about that?

Daniel: I... I don't... I don't know that I did. I think I felt really pretty pessimistic, and I'm guessing that's how the audience felt as well.

Elizabeth: I mean, we are just such social creatures. Like if you think about when your friend is sad, like it kind of pulls you down to. Especially like as the authority figure when you were sad. Like people feel that. Yeah. The doom and gloom approach to climate change interpretation. I think it's pretty pervasive. And, you know, I think in part it's because we have a lot of science. There's no disputing really these climate impacts. And so as an interpreter, when you're looking for something to talk about, you gravitate towards these facts and you want to share them with people you feel so passionately about, the place you live in, work in play in, that you want to bring people into that with you. And I just think. You know, if you are a first time visitor to a National Park Service site and you go to a talk about glaciers melting and then you go back home and it's kind of hard to get food on your table or you're worried about making rent or, you know, you're stuck in a city. You kind of forget what it was like to be in that place. Like, what does a melting iceberg mean to you? If you like, picture your eyes and you think about climate change. The images that are going to come to mind are probably. Icebergs, melting polar bears losing their homes. Maybe like lakes that have been dried out from immense drought or wildfires. And I think as a public, as people were pretty good at understanding the natural impacts of climate change and where the conversation has just lagged for a long time, both in parks and media, is what that means for people.

Daniel: Yeah, it sounds like you're saying the national parks are this perfect venue to talk about climate change, but that most of the time we have focused on the impacts of climate change and we haven't really made the connection for, you know, someone visiting a national park, the connection between how the glaciers are melting and why that matters, or why climate change matters for that person's life at home. Like that connection isn't being made.

Elizabeth: Yeah, and that's played out in the data. Americans are really good at understanding the link between climate change and environmental issues. And then just increasingly bad about thinking about the intersectionality of it. We're great at seeing climate change as an environmental issue, but when you start to think about how climate change will impact our economy, it gets worse. If you start thinking about the intersection between climate change and health, it gets even worse. Although I think during the pandemic there was some conversation about the ways in which climate change will start to increase the risk of vector borne illnesses, increase the risk for pandemics. So maybe we've gotten a little bit better at that. But way at the bottom of that list of comprehending is climate change and social justice. The ways that climate change really increases and magnifies the risks which people are already living in today.

Daniel: Elizabeth, you're thinking about how the national parks are a perfect place to talk about climate change, but how the story and the conversation about climate change has been so negative and so impact in nature focused, then I think there was like a moment where that shifted for you. The story flipped around and you started thinking about the climate conversation in national parks in a new way.

Elizabeth: Yeah. So I went from working in Redwoods at Muir Woods National Monument to interpreting war history and homefront history at Rosie the Riveter World War Two Home Front National Historical Site. So Rosie the Riveter is not a place where people come to expecting to think about climate change. There is kind of that question among staff to like, is this really the place to be talking about climate change? This is an event that happened in the 1940s. This has not just doesn't really have any natural resources to speak of. Leave that to another park site. Hmm. But I'm Italian. I'm not good at leaving things alone. And so I started to think about how how to bring in this story here. And the way in which I decided to do it was let visitors make that connection themselves. And so I put up a whiteboard in the middle of this industrial space. Mm hmm. That said, during World War Two, the country mobilized around a common cause. What cause do you want to mobilize around now? And there is a whiteboard marker. And that was it. So people started to throw their responses up. And I collected all the data, and I tabulated and I tabulated per month. Mm hmm. And I put together word clouds where the biggest word in the middle of this word cloud was the thing most responded to. Mm hmm. And so I started to look at which responses had the most traction. And without fail, month after month, no matter what was happening in the news, it was always climate change.

Daniel: Were you surprised?

Elizabeth: I think I was hopeful. Yeah. And I felt empowered. Hmm. You know, it was that idea that I think a lot of the barriers in talking about climate change are more in my head than it is actually in people's minds. You know, they come to national parks. Seeking answers, seeking perspectives of what happened in the past, and intuitively wanting to make those connections to the present.

Daniel: So then what happened next?

Elizabeth: I came up with a ranger talk called When History Rhymes, kind of based off of that idiom that Mark Twain didn't say, but people think he did. That history doesn't repeat itself, it rhymes. So really using this idea of, okay, well, why would we even talk about history if we're not going to try to learn from it? If we are the nation's storytellers, how do we help people draw lessons from that so that we can help them draw their own conclusions and come away from these sites addressing the issues on their minds, which time and time again was climate change.

Daniel: So basically it's like, how can we take the lessons from mobilizing the history of mobilizing for World War two? What can we apply from that to today? Or what do we definitely not want to apply, But like using history as a tool to understand the present and the future. Is that right?

Elizabeth: That's exactly right. And I think World War Two is is actually a great example because a lot of people would come in, would say, oh, that was the greatest generation. That was the last time Americans were really unified. And that's true to an extent. And it also kind of leaves out the ways in which we mobilized at the expense of Japanese-American citizens who didn't need to be excluded, incarcerated. The ways in which they were. And so the way which we default to telling history tends to be pretty cherry picked. And I think that when telling history, it's really important to really encompass everything that goes into it so that when you're thinking about how to create a future, you can kind of course correct from the ways in which we maybe didn't do it well the first time.

Daniel: So there are also lessons from World War Two about what we what we don't want to do if we're going to mobilize and unify as a country. How can we improve this time, From the last time we did that.

Elizabeth: Our mobilization around World War Two was visionary in a lot of ways. Yeah, it brought women into the workforce. It brought people of color into the workforce. It brought people with disabilities into the workforce. I think it was really a time our country said what other creative talents out there exist and how can we utilize them to combat this really large threat that we're facing? This threat of fascism that we all agree is really important? And that that is truly a lesson to be learned in thinking about mobilizing around climate change is how many different pools of talent exist that we can pull from and weave in to climate actions, climate solutions.

Daniel: So there's lessons that things that we can really that can really inspire our response to climate change. And then there's also things like, Oh, we can also do better than we did before. So it's both.

Elizabeth: It also helps us get to the idea of unintended consequences. Mm hmm. Right. Because World War Two, as a person of Jewish descent, I'm not going to say that the emissions we created from World War Two were worth it. Mm hmm. Mobilizing around World War Two was crucial in facing this threat of fascism that was harming people's lives around the world. And if you look at the data emissions trends from World War Two, it's through the charts.

Daniel: Right after the greenhouse gas emissions that were emitted from tanks and industry and building ships and all of that for World War Two. Those greenhouse gas emissions contributed a lot to climate change.

Elizabeth: It was really one of the the key moments of globalization that set forth the global trade routes that today we take for granted so much the ways in which the country flipped itself to bring parts together from around the country faster.

Daniel: It really set globalization and industrialization on a new trajectory.

Elizabeth: Yeah. And then the economic prosperity after World War Two, the ways in which cash was just flushed into the system for the everyday American. Hmm. That also made it so that we were buying a lot more. We were consuming a lot more. Our carbon emissions per person really increased. We went from one car households to two car households. We started getting washing machines. These are all things that are good. But really get to this idea of progress and how progress looks so different for different people and the unintended consequences that can arise from it.

Daniel: It's super interesting to hear you make the connection from, you know, this starting point of responding and mobilizing to World War Two, and then you start seeing all these knock on effects that are very connected to climate change, but also connected to justice and inequality. And that it starts as one thing, you know, or it seems like one thing responding to World War Two. And then you see that it shifts the trajectory of history in a million ways afterward.

Elizabeth: Yeah. And I think that's the coolest thing about Park Service sites, is that every site across the country just has their fingers in almost every period of history you can. And so if you look at all of these sites across the timeline, you actually have a pretty comprehensive picture of who we've been as a society. The decisions that have been made intentionally or unintentionally, that have kind of been steering us towards this current moment of intense climate change.

Daniel: Okay, so now you're working for the Climate Change Response Program and you're talking to park rangers around the country. You've been doing workshops and stuff and you're asking, what do you want visitors to your park to take away from a program about climate change? What have you found out from that, from those conversations?

Elizabeth: The more that we bring out the history of that park site and how people were embedded into that story, the more we see ourselves in it, both in the people of the past as well as who we can become as a future people. I think rangers are searching for ways to communicate to the public that there's still hope and ways to help people find their own place in getting involved.

Daniel: Yeah, which is pretty different from the like, traditional approach which focuses on, you know, nature and animals and the impacts climate change is having on those things, like the impacts of climate change on, you know, melting glaciers. It's pretty different.

Elizabeth: I think grounding people in the realization that there is work to be done, that we are not doomed at this point. Like I actually think we're in the best time to be alive because we're not really locked into anything. We were locked into a certain amount, but it's not it's not concrete from here. There's so many different ways to make it better or worse, depending on the actions we take. And I think that when we as interpretive staff, when we help people realize what their role is in the story, help open up that space, that there are things to be done, then we've really succeeded. And I think there's different ways to do that. And the field as a whole hasn't really come up with the perfect way.

Daniel: At the end of a program on climate change, everyone wants to know, you know, what can I do? What can I do about climate change for me? And what do you say?

Elizabeth: One of the resources I really like to share is called a climate Venn diagram created by Dr. Ayana Elizabeth: Johnson, who's a really prominent marine biologist. She's a Black woman in science, and she really explores the intersection between race and climate.

Daniel: And so she has these overlapping circles of a Venn diagram describing how anyone can get involved in working on climate change.

Elizabeth: Yeah. Okay. And the questions she asks you to consider are: What do you enjoy doing?

Daniel: Mm hmm.

Elizabeth: What work needs to be done? And what are you good at? Hmm. And where the intersection of these three circles overlaps is a space for you to think about your own contribution. I think the good and the bad news about climate change is that it's so big and it's so overwhelming that it can feel almost like there's too much to do. But that also means that almost anything that you find joy in, there's a space for you in a climate solution, in a climate action.

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Daniel: So tell me what it's what it's been like talking to people around the country, talking to park rangers around the country about how they are doing climate change interpretation.

Elizabeth: Yeah. So I led a training recently at the Channel Islands. Mm hmm. And one of the things we talked about is trying to put ourselves in the shoes of people who are making history. Hmm. I think we, like, personally have thought about history kind of passively. A lot. Mm hmm. Where it just kind of happens.

Daniel: Where it's, like, governed by forces beyond actual people. And we forget that there are real people with names and, like, feelings involved.

Elizabeth: Yeah, exactly. Mm hmm. And so we. I did this both in my programs and with park rangers, where we came up with a list of social changes that have happened over time. Mm hmm. Things like curb cuts on sidewalks or sewage systems.

Daniel: Curb cuts being like, allowing wheelchairs to go onto sidewalks.

Elizabeth: Yeah. I didn't know this, but, you know, it's only been within the last 30 or 40 years or so that those became prevalent. If you were in a wheelchair before then, it was just hard to navigate cities.

Daniel: Curbs did not have like, slopes that you could go up.

Elizabeth: No.

Daniel: So what about the sewage systems then? What's the story behind that one?

Elizabeth: Yeah, I mean, people just used to toss their refuse out in the street. Right? It was like, kind of gross. And no one was really taking responsibility for cleaning it up. And that obviously created a lot of diseases. Mm hmm. You know, a lot of these social systems that we take for granted today, also, a lot of our rights, our voting rights, our civil rights, the fact that women can have bank accounts and credit cards, these are things that we're not just handed to us. They were fought for by people, like you said, with very real emotions against systems that seemed pretty insurmountable.

Daniel: You're describing an understanding of history that is humanizing. You know, there were people throughout history that created the world we live in today.

Elizabeth: And, you know, I imagine that if you asked an abolitionist, do you think that you can actually fight against this massive economic system that profits off of bodies for free.

Daniel: That being slavery.

Elizabeth: Yeah, I imagine that people would have felt pretty pessimistic about the outcome. Yeah, I don't think it was a guarantee at any point that they were going to win. And I think that reminding ourselves that these people and movements had feelings and doubts and insecurities and were just people trying to rise to a moment to confront a crisis that they believed was important and reimagine a world that didn't rely on the systems that they were lived in and trapped in. That's huge. And helping my thinking about climate change.

Daniel: Yeah, that's really powerful that there's lessons we can apply to climate change today.

Elizabeth: And I think that there's almost a skepticism of rangers about and historians about going into the emotions of history. Mm hmm. We think of history as kind of this set of facts that are almost emotionless. And that's how it's been taught too. Mm hmm. Devoid of the human experience. But when you start to go into that and you start to realize that history is just a bunch of people's opinions smushed together that you're thinking about, and those people weren't living in the same world as us, but experiencing the same feelings as us. Then you start to understand a lot more how to apply that into the future, how to confront the pessimism, the anxiety, the doubt, the insurmountable pity we feel of climate change. And look at times in the past where people have overcome these same feelings and persevered through them to create the world we live in now, that sometimes we take for granted.

Daniel: Yeah, it's really powerful to imagine the early days of World War Two and how daunting that must have felt, or the the fight against slavery, or the civil rights movement or the the right to vote that these were such big challenges. And climate change is a similar challenge today that as an individual, it's pretty easy for it to feel so overwhelming.

Elizabeth: Yeah, I think climate change is one of those issues that both manages to make it feel like it's your fault individually, that anything you do is causing it.

Daniel: Mm hmm.

Elizabeth: But also that there's nothing you can do to solve it. And that tension is really hard.

Daniel: Yeah.

Elizabeth: I think one of my turning points in my own interpretation of climate change came from when I was willing to let myself be more vulnerable with the public.

Daniel: Opening up a little bit.

Elizabeth: Yeah. In my programs, I would literally say to people, I'm going to take off my ranger persona now. I'm going to be me, a human who has a job and wears a badge. And I think by doing that, and giving people space to feel the very, very real emotions around climate change, that's almost a necessary foundation to seeing yourself in the solution for climate change.

Daniel: Which is a big part of what you're trying to do then, is is help park rangers interpret climate change and tell the stories of climate change in a way that. Everyone can feel like they're part of the story.

Elizabeth: Yeah, I mean climate change is a human-caused issue, and it has to have a human-caused solution. And I would say the thing that we know that sets us apart as people is our ability to learn from the past. And so this toolkit really or my approach to climate change interpretation, wants to look at a full picture of the past and really take all of the lessons and all of the humanity we can from it.

Daniel: Good and bad.

Elizabeth: Good and bad.

Daniel: I wanted to ask you about this, you know, to push back on that idea a little bit. Like climate change is so huge and difficult and like it's a tough topic on its own. So why do you want to go dragging history into it? It feels like it could make it even more difficult.

Elizabeth: It absolutely could. But climate change is not a simple story. And so when you try to simplify it and you try to just look at it through a very baseline lens, you're going to get a simple solution. And we know this is not a problem with a simple solution.

Daniel: Okay.

Elizabeth: Yeah, it's interesting. In my career as a Park Service interpreter, the two things I've really focused on are talking about climate change and then elevating these undertold stories. And I found that when I bring up these undertold stories, the things that we kind of think about as touchy.

Daniel: Mm hmm.

Elizabeth: That's when people are push back the most. You know, they're like, "why are you talking about this?"

Daniel: This sensitive topic?

Elizabeth: Right.

Daniel: Okay.

Elizabeth: But my job as a historian, as the nation's historian

Daniel: And storyteller.

Elizabeth: And storyteller, is to tell all American stories. Mm hmm. We have a Park Service initiative called, "telling all Americans' stories." And historically, over time, those stories were from a pretty small group of Americans. They were generally white, powerful, affluent men stories who absolutely had a role in shaping who this nation is. And we were giving them such an outsized amount of attention that when we pull our attentions back a little and bring in other narratives, it almost can feel like a statement, when in reality it's just broadening the picture. At MuirWoods where I worked, the story we told for decades and decades very largely revolved around three powerful, affluent men who absolutely helped save the forest. Without them, it would not have been there. But as a woman who doesn't have a lot of money to throw around and causes, I was like, "okay, so that's not my solution. I don't see myself there." And so when we started to expand the story and say who else was involved, what other characters were in this, then I started to see myself more in it. The women who helped fight for and saved Muir Woods didn't have the right to vote. So if you look at today, some of the people who are going to be most affected by climate change -- youth -- they can say, "Oh, I don't have the right to vote yet, but I can see instances in which people used a different form of social pressure to get the cause that they cared about to succeed."

Daniel: That's interesting. The story of Muir Woods, this park unit in the Bay Area. The wealthy, powerful white men that, that pushed to create and preserve those trees in that forest... That's not the whole story.

Elizabeth: Yeah. And I would say from the time the forest was protected in 1908, up until 2018, that's the only story we told. What that story left out was that for generations and time immemorial, that forest was protected and stewarded by the Indigenous people of that land, the Huimen Coast Miwok, and the first movement to actually try to mobilize around and protect their woods was this elite, upper class white women's group called the California Club, who didn't appear on a single sign. And so when we started to expand that story, to bring in the role of women, to bring in the stewardship of Indigenous people, not only did we show that there were more spaces in social movements, there were more people at play than just the well-known figureheads. Mm hmm. Not only that, but there were these really deep pools of knowledge on how to best steward the place that we all care about so much.

Daniel: Yeah. So you're bringing in these other stories, you're broadening the history of Muir Woods, but you're trying to do this across the Park Service. And it's, it's good because it's more inclusive, like you're including more people in the story. But it's also helpful because you're getting a deeper and richer understanding of who we are and what this country is.

Elizabeth: Yeah.

Daniel: And I think it also maybe helps us imagine who we can be.

Elizabeth: I completely agree with that. I think an argument I hear a lot about bringing up these touchy histories is like, "Oh, you're just focusing on the bad stuff." Hmm. But, I mean, if you think about raising a kid, if you're not talking about the bad stuff, how are they going to learn how to be a better adult? Like, it's that it's those formative lessons that teach us who we were and who we want to become. And I think the more I learn about the power of storytelling, the more I really appreciate our role in doing it. And we've actually found that when people today are listening to the same engaging story, their heart rates synchronize across time, across space, so their heartbeats will literally sync up when listening to that same engaging story, which shows that our bodies are just hardwired for this. Across time immemorial, we've used stories to dictate who we are, whether we're talking about creation myths. Or, you know, biblical narratives or the Grimm's Fairy tales.

Daniel: Or the story of World War Two.

Elizabeth: Yeah, exactly.

Daniel: It really emphasizes the importance of what we're trying to do in the National Park Service and what interpretation is trying to do.

Elizabeth: Exactly. Use that power of place to help people realize their place in a really broad story over time.

Daniel: Elizabeth, where are you seeing some really cool stories emerging from the national parks? Where are you seeing history and climate change really intersect in an interesting way? Because I know you're talking to people all around the country.

Elizabeth: Yeah. This product that I've mentioned earlier, I think at this point we've collaborated with around 40 different park sites around the country.

Daniel: This History and Hope Toolkit and program you're, you're working on.

Elizabeth: Mm hmm. I think sometimes the strongest stories are the ones that are the least expected. Mm hmm. So, for example.

Daniel: Like, everyone expects Glacier National Park to be talking about melting glaciers and climate change. That's old news, right?

Elizabeth: Exactly. Like, how does that really apply to me? Mm hmm.

Daniel: Do you have any examples of parks that are telling these cool stories about history and climate?

Elizabeth: One of my favorites is from Maggie Walker National Historic Site out in Virginia, where it's a woman who was really central to a lot of conversations around Black economic empowerment in the early 1900s.

Daniel: She was a social justice activist.

Elizabeth: Absolutely.

Daniel: Okay. So you don't really expect that to be connected to climate change.

Elizabeth: Right. And, you know, it's a story that by and of itself deserves to be told. Mm hmm. But Maggie Walker also lived through a period where her house went from candlelight to electricity, which at the surface level is like, okay, she lived through a period of technology change. Mm hmm. But then you start to think about how much society changed when she lived through it. Mm hmm. Like, her house became electric. She got a dishwasher at some point or something like that. Like these little things that we take for granted today are actually immense amounts of societal change of everyone who lived through it. Mm hmm. And when we think about the scope of the challenges today for climate change, it can feel big. You know, it's like, wow, so much needs to change. But that has happened time and time and again.

Daniel: So she's living through a really revolutionary time.

Elizabeth: Mm hmm. Yeah. I mean, if there's one trait I would call humans, it's adaptable. Hmm. Especially if there's something that can make our lives better. Mm hmm. So Maggie Walker went from candlelight to electricity? Mm hmm. She went from a horse and buggy to a car. And not just any car, but an electric car, which I didn't know was invented in the early 1900s.

Daniel: Wow.

Elizabeth: Right. So when confronted with a better option, we've taken it time and time and again. And I feel like right now we're we're nervous about the changes that need to happen. But that's just been a part of the experience of being a person over time.

Daniel: And it's cool that National Park Sites can tell that story about how we've gone through these big changes in the past.

Elizabeth: Yeah. And, you know, that's at a historic site in Virginia. But the infrastructure at Glacier has changed over time too.

Daniel: Right.

Elizabeth: It's incorporated these new technologies. So you come here thinking about, oh, the glaciers are melting. We've heard that story. Mm hmm. It's not that it's not an important story. But what if, when you're here, you can also think about the ways that society has adapted to new technologies over time?

Daniel: Right. The first park headquarters was here with, you know, logs of wood.

Elizabeth: Probably from the park.

Daniel: Yeah. And, you know, today we have solar panels on the roof. It's a big change.

Elizabeth: That's a story of the innate creativity, adaptability and just pioneering spirit of people. And I think that's something that when I look to the future, I identify those as traits we really need to embody.

Daniel: And we really need to tell stories like that in the national parks.

Elizabeth: Yeah, exactly.

Daniel: So looking at our past, looking at our history, that helps us. It helps us imagine the future and see how we've gone through these changes before. And I think it can help us think more creatively about the solutions that we're working on right now, like the solutions to climate change that we're implementing. Have you seen that play out or how have you seen that?

Elizabeth: I think that's spot on. I think that sometimes in the environmental movement it feels like there's a crisis of imagination. That we feel like we have to settle for these options that aren't really getting to the root of the problem. You know, if we put-- if we transition to solar panels everywhere, that is fantastic. And I think what that's missing also is that the same systems that have created climate change are also the same systems that have really set up and exacerbated a lot of the social inequalities that we're still very much grappling with. I think in both of these cases, there's the idea of something being deemed as "expendable." And I put that in air quotes, but I'm on a podcast, so imagine those air quotes around the word expendable. Mm hmm. Where we think about people as expendable. We absolutely as a society thought about people who were enslaved as expendable. Mm hmm. We thought about the Indigenous stewards and caretakers of this land as expendable for this idea of progress. And progress has brought us to where we are today. And it was done so with the mentality that there was okay things to sacrifice along the way. And I see that a lot of times in climate solutions as well, where we say, "okay, well, we can get some stuff out of this. You know, we can just try to reduce our emissions without looking at the people or places or land that have been viewed expendable along the way."

Daniel: Tell me about this "yes/and" approach to history.

Elizabeth: Well, the "yes/and" approach, I think, comes from improv like. "Yes... And. I like that idea -- and." Mm hmm. And I think we can "yes/and" the successes of history. And a great example of that is the creation of the National Park Service that you and I both work for. This Service that we are a part of, the National Park Service, was a revolutionary idea. That we should protect places around the country for future generations. Mm hmm. We've been called America's best idea. Mm hmm. But the "and" part of that comes from the ways in which the creation of the National Park Service disregarded the existence, the sovereignty and the intentional land management of the places that we've protected by Indigenous people.

Daniel: So you're saying the National Park Service is a pretty cool idea?

Elizabeth: Yes. America's best. So they say. Yeah.

Daniel: So yes. And we can do better as we go forward. We can do better.

Elizabeth: Yeah. And I think the way to do better now is that we have land that's been protected through this incredible idea -- and -- what are the ways that we can incorporate those deep pools of knowledge from those Indigenous people over time? These are people who have lived and sustained and stewarded landscapes for time immemorial, who have so much knowledge accumulated and built up. And there's actually there's been studies that have shown that land stewarded intentionally by Indigenous people can be more productive, more biodiverse than land that's just been left alone. Kind of reshapes our idea of what a wilderness is.

Daniel: It's kind of hard, I think, for people to imagine the world they want to see. It's easier to imagine the worst case scenario.

Elizabeth: I completely agree with that. And I think, you know, that gets back to what we were talking about earlier, where if you look at movements of the past, I think it was a huge feat of the imagination that they even fought for those big social changes. I imagine that if you were enslaved, thinking about an economic system that didn't revolve around slavery must have been mind boggling.

Daniel: It would have been a really, you know, sci-fi utopian kind of thinking to imagine a whole different world.

Elizabeth: Yeah. And almost any social change you can think of, the world that they fought for was must have just felt incomprehensible at the time. The way that sometimes I feel myself thinking about climate change now, which is when I think about a just equitable climate future, it can almost feel incomprehensible and insurmountable. Hmm. And I think that that's that's par for the course with these movements. That's a part of the process. And it's okay to let yourself feel that and recognize that we've gone through that before. We've come out on the other end.

Daniel: Yeah. That studying our our own history can be an inspiring reminder of that.

[drumbeat plays to mark a transition]

Daniel: For people going to interpretive programs, what motivates them to take action on anything, I guess, but what motivates people to take action on climate change?

Elizabeth: I think the verdict is still out, but from what I've seen, the biggest discourse is kind of around, is it fear or is it hope?

Daniel: Like, should this ranger program inspire people and be hopeful so that they'll, they'll take action? Or should it scare them? And should they be worried into taking action?

Elizabeth: Yeah, exactly. You know, I think that there's merit in both. We don't want to sugarcoat the fact that the climate is changing. We are locked in to a degree of changes.

Daniel: Mm hmm. The glaciers here are melting, and the climate has already warmed quite a bit.

Elizabeth: Yeah. And I think that if you try so hard to be hopeful that you don't acknowledge any of that, then you're, you're in a false sense of hope. Mm hmm. And there's one of the biggest ideas I've seen around it is that if you're talking about hope, there's two different types of hope. There's the hope that something will happen. Someone will do something kind of that passive hope, that passive you of history we've been talking about. And then there's an active hope. The hope that if you do something, it can make an impact. And one of my favorite quotes is by an author, Rebecca Solnit, where she says, "Hope isn't just a lottery ticket that you sit on the couch clutching. It's an ax that you break down doors with." And I think that's really where I lean towards, is I want to instill in you the confidence that there's still things to be done, but that it's not just going to happen. Nothing in history has just happened. There are people pushing forces, and you're going to be involved in that, and the causes you care about, or it's just going to happen to you.

[hopeful guitar and drumbeat plays]

Daniel: I love that. Thanks so much for talking with us about all this today.

Elizabeth: Yeah. Thank you so much for having me.

[music continues to play]

Peri: Headwaters is funded by donations to the Glacier National Park Conservancy. As an organization dedicated to supporting the park, the conservancy funds a lot of sustainability initiatives, from solar panels on park buildings to storytelling projects like this one. The Conservancy is doing critical work to prevent the worst impacts of climate change. You can learn more about what they do and about how to get involved at Glacier.org. This show is created by Daniel Lombardi, Michael Faist, Gaby Eseverri, and me, Peri Sasnett. We get critical support from Lacy Kowalski, Melissa Sladek, Kristen Friesen, and so many good people with Glacier's natural and cultural resource teams. Our music was made by the brilliant Frank Waln, and the show's cover art is by our sweet friend Stella Nall. Check out Frank and Stella's work at the links in the show notes. Besides sharing this episode with a friend who might appreciate it, you can help us out by leaving a rating and review in your podcast app. Thanks for listening.

A conversation with Dr. Tyler Hoecker, who studies forest ecology and the changing dynamics of fire as the climate warms. This episode was recorded in August of 2023.

Glacier Conservancy: https://glacier.org/headwaters Frank Waln music: https://www.instagram.com/frankwaln/ Stella Nall art: https://www.instagram.com/stella.nall/

Climate change in Glacier: https://www.nps.gov/glac/learn/nature/climate-change.htm Dr. Hoecker’s research: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0378112721009051

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TRANSCRIPT:

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Lacy Kowalski: Headwaters is supported by the Glacier National Park Conservancy.

Peri Sasnett: This is Headwaters, a show about how Glacier National Park is connected to everything else. My name is Peri, and I'm talking to you from the dense forests of northwest Montana. This episode is an interview that my co-host Daniel did with forest ecologist Dr. Tyler Hoecker about how wildfires exacerbated by climate change are upending our forests. This episode is part of a series of conversations we've been having with a wide variety of climate change experts. These episodes don't have to be listened to in any order, each one stands on its own. And they all focus on a particular aspect of the way the world is being altered by the burning of fossil fuels. Over the past century and a half, human activity has released enough greenhouse gases to warm the Earth's climate over one degree Celsius, with only more warming on the way. Throughout 2023, Daniel sat down with experts to talk about how that warming is altering Glacier National Park, our lives and our futures. [drum and synth beat starts to play] I find fire fascinating, so I think this conversation was one of my favorites. I feel like I've heard most of the usual stories about wildfire so many times, so I was really excited to hear about Dr. Hoecker's research on how forests are responding to climate change. It felt like a new angle. I learned a lot, and I hope you do too.

[beat concludes]

Daniel Lombardi: So, Dr. Tyler Hoecker, welcome to Headwaters.

Tyler Hoecker: Thanks so much for having me.

Daniel: It feels pretty good that we're talking today, or auspicious or bad, on like just this week the smoke really rolled into the park. We have several new fires burning right around us. It's very much fire season, so it's a good time to have this conversation. Will you introduce yourself and talk about kind of your job and the work you're doing right now?

Tyler: Sure. So I'm Tyler Hoecker. I'm a research scientist at the University of Montana in Missoula. And right now I'm doing research trying to understand how climate change is changing fire activity across the western U.S. and trying to project how fires and forests might change into the future.

Daniel: How did you get into fire stuff, like how did that become the path for you?

Tyler: I think everybody is sort of drawn to fire, in a, in a weird way, you know, fires are pretty important, has been an important like catalyst, you know, for civilization. And so I think it's sort of just a compelling thing.

Daniel: It's kind of a universal concept, that fire and flames draw your eye and like draw you in.

Tyler: Absolutely. Absolutely. It's hard to think about forests in the West without thinking about fire. I remember as an undergrad, I took a a forest ecology and policy class, and we went to a community fire meeting. And I just remember being really fascinated by the process. And it was clear to me pretty quickly that it was really important at shaping forests in the West. And so I was really interested in understanding it. And, you know, it's sort of interesting to think back on that. You know, that was 2010. And, you know, I think fire scientists probably understood what was what was unfolding in terms of fire in the West. But I don't think anybody would have been able to really predict, you know, what's happened in the last 13 years since in terms of the amount of area burned every year. And, yeah, the types of fire events that we're seeing every summer now.

Daniel: Yeah. So let's jump into some fire ecology. At one point I was hiking up Mt. Brown and it was kind of in the fall, early fall, the fireweed was blooming and like the sun was rising and kind of glowing through it. And there was the cloud layer was like fog all in the forest. And so I was walking through that and it had burned, you know, like a year before. So everything is charred and crisp and like pretty black. There's no living trees. But in that morning light, it was so beautiful. And for me it was kind of like a pivot point. This, like black backed woodpecker, flew down and landed on the tree in front of me and was feasting on beetles that like the fire-killed trees. And I was like, Oh my gosh, like fire is not ugly. The aftermath of fire can be really beautiful. And I knew intellectually that it's also ecologically important. So maybe we can start with something like that. Like why, why is fire important in a place like Glacier National Park?

Tyler: So one of the things that I like to, to maybe start by kind of acknowledging or stating is that fire, in seasonally dry places, is inevitable. I mean, it's important to think about the benefits and the risks and things like that. And it's also important to acknowledge that it's inevitable. And it's just it is. And it will always, it will always happen in seasonally dry places.

Daniel: Yeah. So like, this place gets dry. There's lots of things growing here -- trees -- it's going to burn.

Tyler: Exactly. And so that means that everything that we see when we look at forests in fire-prone places are shaped by fire. Right? And so the species that we see, that's the forest structure or kind of the age of the trees and the way that they're arranged on the landscape in a place like Glacier, that that is driven primarily by fire and the history of fire.

Daniel: The animals and the trees that have lived here for millions of years have lived here with fire for billions of years. They always have coexisted.

Tyler: Exactly. But the biggest thing is that fires create what we call, like heterogeneity. You know, the opposite of homogeneity. Heterogeneity is variation in species composition, in structure and physical structure of a vegetation. And that heterogeneity confers resilience, right? And so a forest and an ecosystem that's heterogeneous, that's diverse and variable is going to be more resilient to future disturbances, to different pressures and stresses to insects and pathogens to drought.

Daniel: So would you say, when you say that fire creates heterogeneity in an ecosystem, in Glacier National Park, it kind of sounds like you're saying fire creates complexity.

Tyler: Absolutely.

Daniel: Okay. And that creates complexity means different habitats, which means that allows for biodiversity for more kinds of life to live in one place.

Tyler: Absolutely. So biodiversity basically emerges from complexity. Right? A complex system has more niches, has more opportunities for different types of organisms, and that creates a richer system.

Daniel: Compared to, say, a cornfield or like a forest that's all just one kind of -- lodgepole pine say. You know, it's just all one tree. So only certain kinds of birds, only certain kinds of animals are going to live there. You start mixing that up, you burn it and different trees start growing, then you're getting more complexity. You're getting more biodiversity.

Tyler: Yep.

Daniel: That's cool.

Tyler: Yeah.

Daniel: Not every tree in the forest has the same adaptations to fire. Some trees are adapted where they like a little bit of fire. Others, they only grow in places that probably aren't going to burn. So maybe you could break that down a little bit. Like, what are the strategies for trees? What are your options?

Tyler: Right. So trees or plants, you know, have these, as you described them, quirks, right. These characteristics. And in, and in sort of the ecology world we call those traits, but I think makes more sense to call like a strategy. So basically your options are to avoid fire, to be a species that can either hang out for a long period in the understory and during a long fire free period, or can tolerate cool, wet sites where fire is less common and happens never or very infrequently. So those are species like subalpine fir, Engelmann spruce, western red cedar, western hemlock. Those are trees that grow in regions or in microclimates that tend not to burn very often or tend to burn very infrequently. And so there's a long fire-free interval in which they can establish and become dominant.

Daniel: So if you're familiar with the park, then like somewhere like the Fish Creek campground or the Avalanche area. These are like little pockets in the landscape where a creek goes through the middle, they get a lot of rain right there, they get a lot of snow. And so you have a lot of cedar and hemlock, these forests that are really dense and dark and mossy, you can just feel that it doesn't feel like fire comes through there very often.

Tyler: Exactly. Yeah. And so the other strategy or another strategy is to resist fire, and to survive fire as an individual. So those are species like ponderosa pine, western larch, and they have things like thick bark. They drop their lower branches, so that there aren't ladder fuels that would carry flame to the crown. They have rot-resistant wood, so that when their trunk is scarred by fire, that exposed wood doesn't rot. Hmm.

Daniel: And then there's all kinds of species that are-- there's all kinds of other strategies, too.

Tyler: Yeah. And so there's there's maybe sort of a third strategy around what we might say, fire embracing, or fire resilient.

Daniel: Fire loving.

Tyler: Yeah, fire loving. And so these are species that, like in the case of lodgepole pine, they've adapted a strategy where individuals are killed, but they have mechanisms for their genes to carry on. So older lodgepole pine tend to produce some serotinous cones, and they're, they're cones that are closed, and they're bound up by resin. And serotinous cones stay closed until they're heated by fire.

Daniel: They're waiting for fire.

Tyler: They're waiting for fire. And so this is a strategy. This is like putting all your money under the mattress and waiting for that opportunity to strike it big. Right? So the individual bearing those cones is probably dead, as are all of the individuals around it. But what you have is this environment that's perfect for lodgepole pine seedlings. It's bare mineral soil, it's high light, it's low in competition. And so they seed, you know, millions of seeds onto a, into an environment that's perfect for for their regeneration. And so then you have a new single-age cohort that recovers after the fire.

Daniel: Interesting.

Tyler: The other sort of version of being a fire-embracing, or fire-resilient, is to be able to resprout. So that things like aspen or cottonwoods or shrubs.

Daniel: That is they're not good at surviving the fire, but they'll grow back faster than every -- all the other trees. Right.

Tyler: So they survive in a way, their underground structures survive. The top is killed and they can re sprout from that underground. Those underground root structures.

Daniel: It doesn't have to regrow its roots, it's already got them.

Tyler: Yep. It's starting with a bit of a trust fund there and so can do really well.

Daniel: So there's we have all these trees in the park. We've got ponderosa pine in the North Fork, we've got cedar, we've got big dense forests of lodgepole and larch. We've got it all in Glacier. It's a pretty diverse place. So what is the fire regime or what is the history and pattern of wildfire, naturally, in Glacier National Park?

Tyler: Yeah. So, you know, one of the things that's really fun and cool about studying fire in Glacier is that high tree diversity. So you have all of these different individual species that sort of respond and coexist with fire in different ways like we talked about. And what that also means is that the fire regime across Glacier is different depending on where you are. So most of Glacier is what we would call Subalpine forest. So that's forests that are dominated by species like Engelmann Spruce subalpine fir douglas fir, larch, western white pine a little bit.

Daniel: Okay.

Tyler: So these are sort of the mid to high elevation, you know, before you get into that alpine whitebark pine zone. Those are forests that burn infrequently and at high severity. So infrequent in that context means every 150 to 300 years or so.

Daniel: Wow.

Tyler: So that's what we would call infrequent. Mm hmm. And because there's this long time period between fires, there's a long opportunity or a lot of opportunity for biomass to accumulate. And so that means that when fires do come through, they burn at high severity, they burn really hot, they kill most of the trees, they burn off the organic matter on the, on the surface of the soil. There are some places in Glacier that have a more frequent and less severe fire regime. So places like the North Fork, because they're in sort of a warm, dry microclimate and because they have species that can survive fire, that sort of creates the conditions for a more frequent fire regime, which would be burning every 5 to 50 years or maybe 5 to 100 years.

Daniel: So it could be pretty common. Yeah, every five years.

Tyler: Yeah so that's-- and then at low severity, meaning that relatively few individuals are killed in a fire. Right. So maybe some trees are killed, but most of the large mature individuals survive and maybe the small trees in the understory are killed. Hmm. It's also important to note that in a lot of places, those frequent fire regimes were supported by human burning, you know, by by cultural burning, by Indigenous people.

Daniel: Okay. So the park has some areas that historically would have burned pretty regularly, maybe sometimes even as much as every five or ten years, and burning at a fairly low severity. It's clearing out the shrubs and burning the grasses around the trees, burning some of the little trees. But most of the park is stand-replacing fires. Most of the park is not burning that often. In recent years we've had the Howe Ridge fire. We've had the the Sprague fire. What kind of fires are those? Are those the frequent fires or the infrequent ones that happen only every few hundred years?

Tyler: So those two fires together were a really cool opportunity as a scientist, because what we had there was fires that burned in forests that were historically pretty similar on either side of Lake McDonald. And those both of those fires burned almost into that Cedar-Hemlock zone, but mostly in that kind of mid-elevation subalpine forest zone. And the Sprague Fire was really kind of what we think of as typical of the historical fire regime in Glacier. So fire where those trees were in that range of 150 to 300 years old. So you had old forests, pretty big trees, relatively dense and had not experienced fire for a long time.

Daniel: So this the Sprague fire then, I remember when that started, and that's the fire that ultimately burned down Sperry Chalet. This-- this is a fire that you're saying is what we would expect in Glacier National Park, that those trees, 200, 300 years old, they're kind of right on schedule to to burn.

Tyler: Right.

Daniel: But then now things are changing. What is the relationship, if we step back for a second, between fire and climate? We know things are getting hotter. I'm sure that's changing fire here.

Tyler: Yeah. So all fire regimes are driven by three things, basically. By vegetation, climate and ignitions. So we kind of we talk about like a fire triangle defined by those three things. But which is more important or more influential varies from place to place. And so in a place like Glacier, ignitions are not particularly limiting, and vegetation is not particularly limiting. You know, if you think about the forests of Glacier, they have a lot of biomass, right? We have a lot of trees. There's plenty of fuel on the landscape. Okay. And so what tends to limit fire activity in Glacier is climate.

Daniel: Because we also have a lot of lightning strikes.

Tyler: Right. So we almost always have the vegetation ingredient. We almost always have the ignition ingredient, at least during the summer. And what determines whether we have fires and in particular what drives whether we have big fires -- big fires that burn for a long time -- that's really driven by climate.

Daniel: So to put it simply, there are always enough trees here for a good fire. It's really just, is the climate dry enough for it to happen?

Tyler: Exactly. Yeah. There's always enough vegetation on the landscape to burn. And it's whether or not the, the environment and the weather is suitable for burning.

Daniel: So now maybe tell you could tell me some more about then, what are the trends? What's been happening in recent decades? What are we kind of forecasting to see? I mean the headline we know is it's, it's getting hotter. Climate change is warming this place up. How is that affecting fire?

Tyler: Sure. So because climate is a, is a big driver of all fire regimes, and especially in places like Glacier, where climate is the main driver of the fire regime, fire activity is really sensitive to changes in climate.

Daniel: Like big picture, what are we seeing across the American west? I mean, I think we're seeing more fire, right?

Tyler: Yeah. So we're seeing we're seeing longer and hotter fire seasons. So we're seeing that fires can happen for more of the year. They can last longer and they're burning hotter and burning at higher severity, affecting more of the landscape.

Daniel: One study I've seen estimated across the broader American west, something like doubling. We've already seen a doubling of the amount of wildfire burned since the eighties.

Tyler: Yeah. And so we also know that we can see this trajectory of increasing area burned. And the other thing that's different now is that these forests are burning and then trying to recover in a climate that's very different than it was 100 years ago.

Daniel: This is really where your research comes in then.

Tyler: Right, and then seedlings are trying to reestablish in an environment that's several degrees warmer and much drier than it was when the last fire happened. So it's kind of this combination of increasing area burned and increasingly warm, dry conditions that make it more difficult for trees to reestablish after a fire. So that's part of what makes modern fire activity so different.

[drumbeat plays, marking a transition]

Daniel: So maybe we could talk then now about the Howe Ridge fire, and as an example of kind of how the regeneration is changing.

Tyler: Right. Yeah. So some useful context for the Howe Ridge fire is that it burned entirely within the footprint of the 2003 Robert Fire. You know, that was the conventional wisdom in the Northern Rockies is that places that have recently burned are unlikely to burn again for at least a few decades.

Daniel: But so then in 2018, 15 years later, it burned again, like really just the exact same spot. And that was unexpected for fire managers and scientists. Right?

Tyler: Right.

Daniel: Okay. I was watching the fire the night it really took off, burning downhill in a way you wouldn't expect. And a, a woman was watching and crying about the fire. And I was talking with her and I, I didn't really know what to say. And I was like, "well, yeah, I, I didn't think a fire could burn in a spot where it had already burned just 15 years ago." And she was like, "Well, that's climate change. I know it is." And that kind of stunned me. But I was like, I guess she's right.

Tyler: Yeah. And so I talked about how the area that was burned in the Sprague fire was really old and this forest was sort of at a stage where it was, you know, sort of ready to burn. Right. And when that fire burned through, there was all these sort of material legacies left that allowed the forest to recover rapidly. Right. So there are stands that had a lot of serotinous cones. There were big live trees all around the edge of the burned area to, to seed into that area. And when we went back into the the area that the Sprague Fire burned, it was basically like walking through wildflower meadows. It was like a sea of hollyhock, like I've never seen.

Daniel: Wow.

Tyler: And then there'll be other areas that were like a sea of fireweed. Hmm. And that's sort of like what we expect post-fire landscapes to look to look like in the Northern Rockies.

Daniel: So this is really fire being an agent of change and diversity and beauty, the kind of the way we'd expect fire to be here historically or traditionally.

Tyler: Right.

Daniel: And that's the Sprague fire. That's really interesting.

Tyler: Yeah. And so I wasn't here for it, but that's what I imagine things looked like after the 2003 Robert Fire. So the Robert Fire, or like the landscape following the Robert fire, regenerated similar to to what is happening right now after the Sprague fire. Mm hmm. And so we had these, you know, really dense stands of mostly lodgepole pine and larch. But some of the other species that we would expect, like Doug fir and spruce and fir were regenerating in that site. Mm hmm. And then 15 years later, a lot of that standing wood that was killed in 2003, a lot of those snags fell. And so you have a ton of coarse woody debris, sort of matchsticks all across Howe Ridge. So it actually creates these conditions that are really conducive to very high severity fire.

Daniel: Yeah. So basically that's lots of big trees that died in 2003, they're laying on the ground, laying on top of each other. And then all in between those, coming up, are young baby trees that are, you know, less than ten feet tall sometimes. And they're really close together. So now you've got big logs and lots of little bushy trees all mixed together really tightly.

Tyler: Yep. But if you have all these matchsticks and you're going weeks into the summer without rain, you have an opportunity to really dry out these big fuels. And you have all these fine fuels, like you said, sort of right there, intermixed with all of the dead wood. And then you get these warm, dry conditions, you get an ignition, and you get some strong winds, and that can that can burn these very young forests in a way that we haven't observed much before the last few years.

Daniel: Hmm. So then that's where things are a little bit unexpected.

Tyler: Absolutely. So we measured both of these fires two years post-fire. Okay. So the Sprague Fire we've sampled in 2019, and Howe Ridge we sampled in 2020.

Daniel: Two years after they burned.

Tyler: Yep. So kind of the key pieces of information that we were after was, the density of trees -- how many trees are there, you know, per area? And what's the composition? What species are they? Mm hmm. Because we wanted to know how the forest that was regenerating was similar or different to the forest that was there before. And so in general, what we found in the Sprague Fire was that the composition that we sampled in those first few years post-fire was pretty similar to the composition beforehand. So there was a little bit less of the spruce and fir, which you might expect because they're very fire sensitive and they're a little bit more shade tolerant. But we had basically the full suite of species that we saw before the fire, we were able to identify post-fire.

Daniel: So the Sprague Fire like, is an example of the forest regenerating kind of as you'd expect. You see most of the trees that were there, that were burned, you see most of them growing back up.

Tyler: Yeah.

Daniel: And then you're comparing that to the Sprague fire, to the Howe Ridge fire.

Tyler: Right. And so we did the same thing in the Howe Ridge fire, as I mentioned, you know, fires are are really complex and heterogeneous in terms of their severity. We went to places that burned at high severity because we were really thinking about the future, and thinking about as the climate becomes warmer, it's really these places that have burned at high severity that are going to give us the best sort of window into the future climate -- where forests are headed.

Daniel: You didn't survey randomly. You picked intentionally areas that burned really severely.

Tyler: Right. So it's not that those places characterize the whole fire or and certainly not that they characterize the whole park, but they characterize what happens in a forest when it burns twice and when it burns at high severity twice.

Daniel: So what happens?

Tyler: So now we've burned it twice. There's almost no material left on the landscape to provide these shaded microsites for seedlings. We're really far now from seed sources and any of the seed sources that might have been within that burned patch. Like serotinous lodgepole pine haven't had the opportunity to develop. Serotinous cones don't develop on lodgepole pine until about 30 years in. And so you have no serotinous cones.

Daniel: Because they weren't ready.

Tyler: They didn't have long enough to develop and mature and then even non-serotinous cones, these trees are just 15 years old, right? So they're just approaching sort of sexual maturity. So they may have some cones, but probably not very many. Uh huh. So it's kind of, you know, this combination of factors where the post-fire environment is much harsher for regeneration because we're missing this residual forest structure that acted like a canopy. And we're missing a lot of the seed sources that are, you know, essential for the forest to regenerate.

Daniel: So it's kind of like the fire burning a little bit ahead of schedule. Though that may have happened in the past, we don't know quite how often, it's definitely unusual for the past century.

Tyler: Right. So now you're really locked into this trajectory of only the most fire-adapted species can really reestablish in that type of setting. And so what we saw was, you know, the vast majority of our plots were either larch, dominated by larch, or lodgepole pine.

Daniel: So comparing them, the two survey sites, you're swimming through fields of wildflowers on one side, and then on Howe Ridge, are you just baking in the sun?

Tyler: Basically. I mean, it depends where you were, but particularly that south-facing slope of Howe Ridge that you see when you look across Lake MacDonald, you know, that's a south-facing slope. So it's particularly warm and dry. And so that area before 2003, that band along the lakeshore, that was Cedar-Hemlock forest. Hmm. And you can imagine what it's like to walk around in it, in an old-grown Cedar Hemlock forest. It's totally shaded. It's, you know, you have plants that don't even photosynthesize, there's so little sunlight. It's moist, right? Huge old trees.

Daniel: Lots of moss.

Tyler: Yeah. Moss and

Daniel: It's like the Avalanche Creek area

Tyler: It's like Avalanche Creek area. Yeah. So you go from that before 2003 to now, you have a setting where it's super dry, rocky, and it's mostly willow and some aspen, some larch, some Douglas fir seedlings coming back, but really low tree densities, particularly in that area. So I think it's just really striking that in this one particular area, we went from an old growth Cedar-Hemlock forest to a really hot, dry shrub field.

Daniel: Wow.

Tyler: In 20 years.

Daniel: Yeah. Interesting.

Tyler: So it's not that reburns are are everywhere all the time right now. But what makes them so interesting from a science perspective is that we think of them as like this window into the future. Yeah. And so that's why we want to go into those places now and start to understand what's happening. And, you know, the thing with the Cedar-Hemlock forests around Lake MacDonald is those are established centuries ago. Mm hmm. And so not only has there been modern climate change, but, you know, there were fluctuations in climate before the industrial period, and those forests established during what was called the Little Ice Age. So it was a particularly cold period at the end of the Holocene, the last kind of interglacial period.

Daniel: When the park's glaciers were really robust.

Tyler: Right. So that's when those forests established. So they establish in a climate that's really, really different from the climate today. Mm hmm. And so the thing that's cool and fascinating about trees is that they're really long-lived and they're really resilient. So trees can sort of be out of sync with their climate for a pretty long time.

Daniel: Interesting.

Tyler: Right? Because they have these big roots that can access water from a lot of different places. They create their own microclimates. Mm hmm. So the Cedar-Hemlock forests around Lake McDonald have been out of sync with climate for a while. Mm hmm. But what we're seeing is that fire is really catalyzing that change. Mm hmm. Where eventually, if the climate continued on the trajectory that it's on, even in the absence of fire, those Cedar-Hemlock forests may die during a severe drought or something like that. But fire comes through and is really the event that catalyzes that shift in in an abrupt way.

Daniel: Hmm. Can you give me some more details on that? Like what's regrowing? Grass?

Tyler: Yeah, I mean, what that looks like is, right now that landscape is is really dominated by shrubs. It's really open. And in a few decades, it may be like a more open forest that we find really pleasant and desirable. Or it may be that we just have this really prolonged period of recovery, and we may never get a forest recovering in the way that it was before.

Daniel: Hmm. So to some extent, fire re-burning more regularly, burning hotter, more often because of climate change, it's kind of simplifying the landscape a little bit. Whereas historically, traditionally, the wildfire was more of a diversifying agent on the landscape.

Tyler: I think that's a really good way to put it, yeah. And that's what's so hard to grapple with, is that like if we're able to sort of mitigate global climate change, and temperatures sort of plateau, and rates of burning plateau, it's not impossible that the historical forest types that were there can reestablish. But with all those caveats, that would still take, you know, a century to play out and it's -- a century is a long time. For people. You know, it's not so much time for trees, but it is a really long time for people. And so I think sometimes like, us, especially scientists, kind of get hung up on like, well, how permanent is this transition? Like, it's not going to be that way forever. And I think sometimes that's missing the point a little bit. Because it is that way now, and it's going to be that way for the next few decades to centuries. And that's really what matters for us. Right. And yeah, for several generations of people on the landscape.

Daniel: That's what matters for us and for anyone we're ever going to meet.

Tyler: Exactly.

[drumbeat plays, marking a transition]

Daniel: And then I guess if we're making predictions about what Glacier's going to look like 100 years from now, the safest bet is that all of these different things are going to play out in different places. Some places are going to become grassier, some -- it's going to be all of the above, I guess.

Tyler: Exactly.

Daniel: Okay.

Tyler: What that means, though, is that, you know, those are a few different pathways that are all possible and like you said, are are all likely to play out somewhere on the landscape. Mm hmm. What's less and less likely are old forests, and forests dominated by really fire-sensitive species. Mm hmm. So old subalpine, spruce-fir forests, old cedar-hemlock forests, old whitebark pine forests, those are the types of forest that we probably will see less of in Glacier in the future. Or will occupy less of the park than they do now, or than they did in the past.

Daniel: Yeah, maybe this isn't even your job to answer this, but what's the response then? What can we do to adapt to this?

Tyler: I mean, I do think that, yeah, it's not my job to say exactly what we should do. I do think it's my job to try to help to provide information about, this is what we think is happening, and these are the likely scenarios. What we should do about it really depends on what do we value? What do we find desirable, what do we find undesirable? And what are we willing to do? Mm hmm. There's a really useful framework for climate adaptation that was actually developed by the National Park Service Climate Change Response program called RAD: Resist, Accept, Direct. And it's a really useful way to think about, okay, here's where we're headed. And then it helps us to decide, okay, is that where we want to go? And then if it's not, let's think about the options. We can resist -- in Glacier, resistance means when we have a really hot, dry summer and there's a fire in the park, we're going to put sprinklers in Avalanche Creek. Mm hmm. Or we're going to do things like they did in Sequoia and wrap Mylar around precious individual trees. Yeah. Right. That's resisting.

Daniel: Doing everything we can to stop it from burning.

Tyler: Doing everything you can, right? Or or bringing in air tankers and suppressing fires right when they start. Mm hmm. And sort of saying, Yeah, fire -- we know fire is like an important ecological process in Glacier, but we're not really comfortable with the consequences, and so we're going to resist.

Daniel: Mm hmm.

Tyler: Directing might be more like, let's allow certain types of of change to play out, and let's sort of give some nudges or kicks along the way to help the system move in a direction that we find more desirable.

Daniel: Like prescribed burning, maybe.

Tyler: Like prescribed burning, or fuel treatments, or thinning out vegetation to modify fire behavior when it does happen. Mm hmm. Or in the case of like, replanting, maybe we replant with species that are more fire-adapted or more drought-tolerant than what was there before. Instead of just replacing the forest with what exactly what was there before. Right. So that was Direct. And then Acceptance is just saying here in Glacier, we're just going to let things run their course and see what happens. Mm hmm. And just be okay with what that, whatever that is.

Daniel: Yeah. And it could be, you know, in this part of Glacier, in these situations, we accept it. And in this part of Glacier, and in these circumstances, we resist or direct it.

Tyler: Exactly. And so if it looks like we're headed towards a park-like larch forest, we might say, yeah let's accept that. That sounds good. We like, we like hiking through that better than we like hiking through really dense lodgepole pine. Like, maybe that's okay. But when that means, you know, a transition to invasive cheatgrass, maybe that's not acceptable to us anymore.

Daniel: Yeah.

Tyler: I do think it's important to just like, just at least acknowledge, you know, it is hard to watch old growth Cedar Hemlock forest burn. You know, like, even if there are beautiful wildflowers that come up after. Mm hmm. It can be beautiful and fascinating and also sad.

Daniel: Yeah. And it's like, it is a natural part of this ecosystem, and yet it is also increasing in severity due to human-caused climate change. And it is like, a natural thing, and it was also like, toxically unhealthy for our lungs to live in it. [both laugh] Right. Like.

Tyler: Right.

Daniel: It's all of this.

Tyler: Yeah. I mean, I think that's where it adds a lot of complexity to the "what to do about it" as well. Because you can take a perspective that like we're just going to let things play out and be hands off. But the reality is that we are already having an influence on this system. You know, even if we're not out there harvesting trees, you know. And so pretending that we aren't influencing the system is is sort of, I think, a sort of choosing to ignore the influence that we know we're having.

Daniel: That we already have. Not to mention the 10,000 years of history of people intentionally having a lot of influence anyway. So it's like....

Tyler: Right. So I think, you know, it gets tricky and we should be careful about everything we do as, you know, like stewards of a landscape, but, like the context for stewardship is changing really rapidly, and so we might need to get more comfortable with things that we've previously found uncomfortable.

[guitar and drumbeat starts to play]

Daniel: Mmhmm. Well, Dr. Hoecker, thanks for coming in, chatting with me. This has been really, really fascinating.

Tyler: Awesome. Thank you, Headwaters team, for having me. Pleasure to be here.

[hopeful, slightly ambiguous music continues to play]

Peri: Headwaters is funded by donations to the Glacier National Park Conservancy. As an organization dedicated to supporting the park, the Conservancy funds a lot of sustainability initiatives from solar panels on park buildings to storytelling projects like this one. The Conservancy is doing critical work to prevent the worst impacts of climate change. You can learn more about what they do and about how to get involved at Glacier.org. This show is created by Daniel Lombardi, Michael Faist, Gaby Eseverri, and me, Peri Sasnett. We get critical support from Lacy Kowalski, Melissa Sladek, Kristen Friesen, and so many good people with Glacier's, natural and cultural resource teams. Our music was made by the brilliant Frank Waln, and the show's cover art is by our sweet friend Stella Nall. Check out Frank and Stella's work at the links in the show notes. Besides sharing this episode with a friend who might appreciate it, you can help us out by leaving a rating and review in your podcast app. Thanks for listening.

A conversation with Dr. Caitlyn Florentine, research physical scientist with the US Geological Survey, who studies snow and ice in Glacier. This episode was recorded in May 2023.

Glacier Conservancy: https://glacier.org/headwaters Frank Waln music: https://www.instagram.com/frankwaln/ Stella Nall art: https://www.instagram.com/stella.nall/

Overview of the park’s glaciers: https://www.nps.gov/glac/learn/nature/glaciersoverview.htm

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TRANSCRIPT:

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Lacy Kowalski: Headwaters is supported by the Glacier National Park Conservancy.

Peri Sasnett: You're listening to Headwaters, a show from the icy mountains of northwest Montana about how Glacier National Park is connected to everything else. My name is Peri, and this episode is an interview that my co-host Daniel did with glaciologist Dr. Caitlyn Florentine—about how the U.S. Geological Survey studies the park's glaciers. This episode is part of a series of conversations we've been having with a wide variety of climate change experts. These episodes don't have to be listened to in any order. Each one stands on its own. And they all focus on a particular aspect of the way the world is being altered by the burning of fossil fuels. Over the past century and a half, human activity has released enough greenhouse gases to warm the Earth's climate over one degree Celsius, with only more warming on the way. Throughout 2023, Daniel sat down with experts to talk about how that warming is altering Glacier National Park, our lives and our futures.

[background drum and bass music builds]

Peri: Glaciers are the park's namesake. So digging into the details of the science around them feels like the heart of the park's story. I will say this is a fairly wonky and detailed conversation about glacier science. I studied geology, so I loved it. But I think no matter your background, you'll find it thought provoking.

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Daniel Lombardi: Dr. Caitlyn Florentine, welcome to Headwaters.

Caitlyn Florentine: Hello. Thank you for having me.

Daniel: Can you introduce yourself? What's your job? What do you do?

Caitlyn: Yeah. My name is Caitlyn Florentine, and I work as a glaciologist for the U.S. Geological Survey. I'm a research scientist.

Daniel: So what have you been up to for the past couple of days?

Caitlyn: I've been here in the park doing fieldwork on Sperry Glacier.

Daniel: So you were up up in the mountains for the past couple of days?

Caitlyn: Yes.

Daniel: That's exciting.

Caitlyn: Yes, We had excellent weather.

Daniel: Do you think of yourself as a glaciologist or you study the cryosphere? How do you describe what you do?

Caitlyn: I consider myself a cryosphere scientist, and the cryosphere is the portion of the earth that is frozen. So anything involving frozen water: land, ice, sea ice, permafrost, seasonal snow. So I'm a glaciologist, and I think of it from sort of a geophysical perspective.

Daniel: You approach the study of the cryosphere, you approach glaciology from a very quantitative way. What does that mean?

Caitlyn: Correct. We are interested in being very sort of precise with the numbers. So quantifying the amount of water that's entering and exiting the glacier system, for example. So rather than having a sort of description of the quality of what's happening, we also strive to put numbers to that so that we can start to be a bit more precise and exact in our understanding, which then enables us to connect to other studies and sort of systems of the of the earth.

Daniel: So what made you want to get into this field? How did you get started in the study of the cryosphere?

Caitlyn: I really love the mountains and to be in the mountains and there is a plethora of snow and ice in mountain environments. So I studied geology as an undergrad at Colorado College, and I was really fascinated by earth processes and I knew I wanted to study something on timescales that were relevant to humans. And so I made a choice for graduate school between volcanology and glaciology. And then my sort of recreational interests led to me choosing glaciology ultimately.

Daniel: Oh, that's super interesting. Cool. Yeah, because you could have studied a geology that, you know, spans millions or even billions of years, but you had a desire to keep it on a human scale or closer to a human scale anyway.

Caitlyn: Exactly. My colleagues who study seasonal snow, for example, are inspecting processes that are happening over the timescale of seconds or or hours or days. And it's sort of that opportunity to toggle the window of time that we're considering, I think really captivated me and drew me to the cryosphere.

Daniel: Oh, that's okay. That plus you want to go be able to go up into the mountains for work. So it's a good fit. Well, what makes your work important? Like, why does the cryosphere matter? Why do glaciers matter?

Caitlyn: The cryosphere right now is changing very quickly, relative to what we've observed in the last ten, twemty, fifty, a hundred years. And so that rate of change makes it really important that we not only document the changes that are occurring and understand the sort of pace of that change relative to the historical context, but also that we understand how these systems are working. Because with the rapid change of the cryosphere, so changes to seasonal snow and changes to glaciers, there are consequences downstream. So one sort of motivating example of why glaciers are important is the meltwater that glaciers provide. So a glacier sitting on the landscape will have some discharge of meltwater during the late summer months, at least in this part of the world. And that delivery of meltwater during a time of year that would otherwise be quite dry can be really critical for the aquatic habitats and for sort of broader water resources.

Daniel: I'm hearing you say kind of two things in particular there. One of them is that studying the cryosphere is important because it's changing and it's an indicator of change. So it's helpful in understanding how the world is changing. But you're also saying glaciers and the cryosphere is made of water, and water is important to people and wildlife and everything. They're valuable for that reason. Is that right?

Caitlyn: Yes, exactly.

Daniel: So I don't know if you know this, Caitlyn, but historians think that maybe one of the first euro-Americans to document a glacier here was this military guy John Van Austell, in the 1870s. But the complication is that he didn't realize he was looking at a glacier when he was. And so it wasn't until like ten years later, he came back to the same area inside what is now the park with a geologist. And they're like, oh, that's a glacier. And so then this area starts to be known as a place with glaciers. Of course, the Native Americans, the Kootenai people, the Blackfeet people, they had words describing the ice of this place. They they knew this place was full of snow and glaciers and ice for a long time before that. All of this is kind of me building up to ask you, you know, like some people might be surprised that glaciers are kind of hard to spot, surprisingly. What do you think? I mean, is that does that feel right?

Caitlyn: Yeah. So a glacier as it's now defined, it gets trickier when the ice masses get smaller. So if you're in a landscape where, there's, you're looking down a valley, and particularly at a time of year when the seasonal snow is absent. And so you're just looking at bare rock and bare ice, it will probably be quite evident what is a glacier versus what is not. Also, if you're looking at a glacier that has a lot of evidence of motion. So if you're looking at the terminus of a tidewater glacier and there are giant chunks of ice calving off into the ocean, then the sort of, all of the criteria for defining a glacier—ice that moves—is really in your face and really evident. In a landscape like Glacier National Park, the glaciers are much smaller and you have to hike a lot further into the mountains to observe them. And this has been true for the last last several centuries, if not last many thousands of years. This landscape did have big valley filling glaciers, but that was up to tens of thousands of years ago, maybe 12,000 years ago.

Daniel: So to put that another way, if you go to Alaska or if you came to this area 12,000 years ago, you're going to notice some glaciers, like they're pretty obvious because they're huge chunks of jagged moving ice. But these days in this place, glaciers are covered by seasonal snow. They're covered in rocks. They're they're smaller. It's a more complicated thing to discern. So it's not surprising that visitors today, when they come to the park or scientists a century ago maybe weren't sure at first when they were looking at a glacier.

Caitlyn: Precisely.

Daniel: Well, let's get a definition out of the way, then. Really simply what what is a glacier?

Caitlyn: A glacier is a body of ice that moves.

Daniel: Okay, simple enough.

Caitlyn: And when we talk about glaciers as moving bodies of ice, it's important to understand that, like most of us interact with ice when it's stagnant and it isn't under sufficient stress to deform and flow. But ice is actually a vicious material. So a comparable material would be honey or ketchup. So glacier ice will deform when it's under pressure. So same is how you have to hit a ketchup bottle to get the ketchup to come out of the bottle. So we sort of have two components of glacier motion. One is the ice deformation, the sort of vicious, fluid motion that I just described. And then one is the the sliding of the ice over its bed. When water gets to the bottom of a glacier, it can sort of pop the ice off its bed. And that decoupling and reduction of friction causes the glacier to move.

Daniel: Interesting. One of the things I'm taking away from what you're saying is that nature and glaciers, they don't really fit in a box. We say like this is a glacier, but in reality it's kind of a continuum or a spectrum of of movement of ice and water and rocks. Right?

Caitlyn: Precisely. And that's where science can be helpful for clarifying this complexity and ambiguity that would otherwise be difficult to navigate or interact with. So when we assign a scientific definition for what is a glacier, then we can start to categorize nature and put a more precise understanding to how much water is frozen in the landscape, for example.

Daniel: Mm hmm. All right. Well, can you give me some more basic facts about the park's glaciers? How old are they? When, when did they form?

Caitlyn: Yeah, that's an interesting question. And I think it's important when we ponder that question to understand that because the glacier is moving, it's sort of cycling ice through itself.

Daniel: Hmm.

Caitlyn: Every every year at all times.

Daniel: So because a glacier is moving ice and it's ice that's, you know, cycling through, any piece of individual ice is going to be less old than the footprint or the existence of a glacier in that area.

Caitlyn: Exactly.

Daniel: Okay. Interesting. And so let's describe that process now. I guess simply glaciers, you say, are a mass of ice that's moving. How that happens is you get a lot of snow in the winter. It compresses into ice and then it flows under its weight and melts out the other end. So it's this like conveyor belt of moving ice. How do you define or how do you describe that process, like the glacier anatomy 101.

Caitlyn: Yeah. So traditionally and sort of in our most well behaved, textbook understanding of a glacier, we have this body of ice that stretches from some high elevation zone to a lower elevation zone. And the high elevation zone typically can be described as the accumulation zone. So there's actively mass accumulating every year in that zone. So there's more snow that accumulates, then melts in the accumulation zone at high cold elevations. And so you have this conveyor belt motion and the snow that's accumulating, up high is compressing and eventually densifying into ice, which then is flowing towards the ablation zone.

Daniel: Okay, so basically it's colder up higher and it's warmer, down lower. So the higher zones, you get a lot more snow, it compresses into ice and then the glacier flows and if it's growing, it's going to keep flowing until it reaches a place that's warm enough that it melts.

Caitlyn: Precisely.

Daniel: And that's happening kind of on a seasonal basis, but it's also happening on a really much larger timescale, too.

Caitlyn: Yeah. However long it takes, those particles that are deposited in the high accumulation zone. The sort of timescale of their residence time, if you will, within the glacier will be defined by how fast the glacier is moving. So there are places on the Greenland ice sheet where it takes thousands of years for a snowflake that falls at the top of the ice sheet to make its way all the way to the margin and melt out. The glaciers here in Glacier National Park are much smaller, so the residence times would be much shorter.

Daniel: Like, it might take a snowflake that lands at the top of Sperry Glacier a few decades to reach the melt zone or the ablation zone?

Caitlyn: Precisely. And we have evidence of materials, you know, materials from the human system being deposited up high on Sperry Glacier, for example, and then melting out several decades later. So that's an indicator of the residence time.

Daniel: Yeah. So the evidence we have on Sperry Glacier for that residence time, was there a a ski? That like, got lost up on Upper Sperry Glacier and then eventually melted out?

Caitlyn: Yes.

Daniel: Okay. So do we know like, oh, this ski is from the seventies or something?

Caitlyn: Precisely.

Daniel: So you can say, okay, it takes a few decades for the for a snowflake or a ski to move through the glacier.

Caitlyn: Yes.

Daniel: Interesting. Now, we should explain that moraines are—all the little crumbs of the mountain that the glacier is like scraping off, they pile up around the edge of the glacier, and that's called a moraine. So there's. Yeah. Do you have a good way to explain what a moraine is?

Caitlyn: Yeah. So a moraine is a hill of poorly-sorted rock that's deposited on the edge of a glacier. So it's sort of a sharply crusted hill that hugs the edge of the glacier. And so it will form as those crumbs of rock and sediment are deposited along the margin of the glacier. When the glacier occupies the same position for a long period of time. However, when the glacier starts to retreat, that moraine will persist, so it acts as evidence and demarcating the stamp that of land that the ice occupied for some long period of time.

Daniel: So that's helpful. If you're a scientist without a whole lot of fancy technology a century ago, you can just like hike around in the park and you can see a glacier, but then you can see like, Oh, there's a moraine, and I can see where the glacier used to be because the dirt pile or the moraine surrounding it is far away from the ice now. So I can tell that the glacier is retreating away from where it used to be.

Caitlyn: Exactly.

Daniel: Interesting. Yeah. So there's all these clues of what the glaciers have done in the past using those clues. Do we know how? How old are the park's glaciers?

Caitlyn: Interesting question. There's been a sort of waxing and waning of glaciers in their present configuration. Now, 12,000 years ago, we have evidence, we know that this entire mountain range was encased in ice when we go further back in time. But the sort of predominant thinking and understanding, piecing together other geologic evidence is that these mountains were relatively ice free, roughly 7,000, 6,500 years ago. And then the the present modern glaciers sort of formed and have persisted. So it's it's an interesting, like the question of how old are the glaciers is actually sort of more interesting than one might think because it's not just a stagnant patch of ice sitting on the landscape. It's dynamic and it's interacting with the climate system and then it's physically flowing.

Daniel: That's super interesting. And I think that's like my take away from this whole conversation and is that these questions that seem simple, like what is a glacier? How old are the glaciers? They seem simple, but they actually have a lot of layers. And the more you dig in to it, the more complicated it gets.

Caitlyn: There are physical constraints over how fast a landscape can evolve, and that's what makes the current moment in time that we're living in right now so sort of fascinating. And what really underscores Earth science in general is we can't always look to the past for analogs of how the Earth's system responds to the sort of radiative forcing, or the mismatch between how much heat we're keeping in the Earth's system versus how much is being radiate, like vented back into space.

Daniel: Okay, I really like that because in climate change thinking and sciences, there's a lot of understanding that because we're changing the climate so fast, we can't necessarily look at the past and how the climate has changed in the past to understand how it's going to change in the future. And yet, because we can't see into the future, but we have some tools to see into the past, we end up kind of relying on inevitably and maybe over relying on evidence from the past to make guesses about the future. One thing I know that glaciologists or scientists, geologists were doing here in Glacier National Park a century ago is they're they're taking the cutting edge technology that they had a camera and they're going out near and on the glaciers and they're taking pictures. How does that come back up today? Like, what is the these historic photos? What does that allow for today?

Caitlyn: So if you have a camera today and go back to the exact same location, you can take the same picture. And the only thing that has changed is whatever's changed on the landscape. And so that repeat photography exercise provides a really objective qualitative documentation of how the landscape has changed.

Daniel: And so that was kind of a sub-project that your team at the U.S. Geological Survey started doing in the nineties as a way, Oh, let's collect up these historic photos that scientists took a century ago, and let's take the same pictures from the same vantage point. Let's take it again. We can even try and take it on the same day or about the same time of year time a month and see how how things have changed. So it's it's a very intuitive kind of science. Just what did it look like 100 years ago with a photo? And what does it look like today?

Caitlyn: Exactly. So it provides the starting point for understanding the character of landscape change. And then with our modern techniques, we can start to dig into, you know, addressing questions of what exactly is driving that change? What does that change say about what's going to happen in the future?

Daniel: The repeat photos are cool because they I mean, they answer the most very basic question: are things changing? But it's it's very qualitative. As you say, it's it's not super measurable. We can see that oh, yes, Sperry Glacier is a lot smaller now, but it's hard to measure that. Which shifts us then to the science and the approach to studying the cryosphere that your team has had for the past couple of decades. Where repeat photography is a nice communication tool and a good, you know, starting point to understand the the quality of the change. But now you're bringing Newtonian physics and really measurable science to the glaciers.

Caitlyn: Yeah, and I would say the repeat photography project is a precise scientific exercise. So it is providing a very objective, repeatable, you know, it's reproducible. And it's not, there's no sort of manipulation or prerogative or agenda that's influencing the outcome of that photograph. So it still is applying the scientific method of the objective to capture the same image from the same exact location.

Daniel: Yeah, that's important to remember that the repeat photos aren't just, you know, 100 years ago and today there's actually a lot of intervals in there. And we can repeat photos now that were taken in the eighties or the nineties. And so I think that's important. What you say about, it is a very scientific approach, but it's also a very powerful communication tool to see how things change.

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Daniel: So you mentioned this at the start, but the past few days you've been up in the park, you've been in the mountains, you've been at Sperry Glacier. So you're still venturing into the field, just like the scientists and the glaciologists a century ago. But it's a little different. Let's talk about about your past few days. What were you trying to do up there and what was it like?

Caitlyn: Yeah. So this week we approached Sperry Glacier to measure the winter mass balance. So we visit Sperry Glacier twice a year: in the fall, and in the spring. And in the fall, we're measuring how much ice the glacier has lost during the mount season. And in the spring, we're measuring how much snow has accumulated on the glacier during the winter season. And so these two measurements give us an understanding of the mass balance, or the mass budget of the glacier. So mass balance is basically the checking account for water mass on the glacier every year. And here in Glacier National Park, we started taking these measurements in 2005 on Sperry Glacier. However, the U.S. Geological Survey has been conducting this mass balance research on glaciers in North America since as early as the 1950s. So the mass balance measurements involve installing stakes on the glacier surface, were measuring snow depth and also snow density. So we're measuring how deep the snow is, and then we're measuring the the mass of the snow. And this year, we've seen a very precipitous decline of the seasonal snowpack. And so we were measuring snow densities that were quite high for this time of year. So usually spring snow densities are maybe 500, 550 grams per cubic centimeter. In the wintertime, lighter, fluffier snow. I mean, at Bridger Bowl, the sort of coldsmoke, as it's referred to, is about 10% water mass. And in a more typical winter snow pack around here, in the sort of wetter climate of Glacier National Park is maybe 30, 40% water mass. And so we were in the springtime, it's maybe 50% water mass. And this week, on Monday, we were measuring 60%. So that's quite dense. And we also were measuring snow depths that were quite shallow relative to what we've measured in the past 18 years. So it was pretty bony. The snow cover is thin,.

Daniel: Pretty bony.

Caitlyn: Probably about a month ahead in the melt season relative to sort of the typical progression.

Daniel: Let me go back to the start of this. So this has been going on since 2005 here on Sperry Glacier, but it's been going on a lot longer around the country and around the world. And when you actually go to do it, it sounds like it gets pretty complicated, but the concepts kind of simple. Basically, you're going up and you're measuring the glacier. How thick is it? How dense is it in the spring and in the fall? And then you can if you do that over time, you can see how the mass of the glacier is changing from winter to summer and over time.

Caitlyn: And it's even simpler than that because we're just measuring the surface. So we're just measuring how much mass is added and how much is subtracted. So we don't actually measure how thick and dense the glacier writ large is. We're just sampling how much mass is entering and exiting the system. So we have these little dip sticks, basically point measurements at stakes around the glacier, and that gives us the starting point for understanding that seasonal rhythm. And then we take those measurements back to the office and we then extrapolate from those points to get a glacier-wide balance. We then calibrate those measurements against measurements from space in order to account for the fact that we're not going to install stakes where there are locations that we can't access on foot. So we're not going to install them in crevasse zones, we're not going to install them at the base of avalanche paths. And so knowing that we have this bias, this sort of systematic bias that we need to correct, we calibrate against different representations of the surface mass balance. So these stake measurements, though, that I'm describing that we just collected this week for field measurements are very powerful because they provide direct measurements of the seasonal rhythm of mass accumulation and ablation.

Daniel: So some years I suppose you're seeing the glacier grow, right?

Caitlyn: So this will be the 18th year of glacial logical measurements on Sperry Glacier. And I think there's only been one year that we've seen a positive balance. And so overall, Sperry has lost more mass than it has gained in the past 18 years.

Daniel: Interesting. So you're taking these measurements of Sperry Glacier and you can see, you can graph it then and you can see it like, oh, it held kind of steady this year. Oh, it dipped a little Oh, it maybe went up a little. But overall, you're watching it trend downward.

Caitlyn: Yes.

Daniel: Now, that seems like a great system, but it also seems like a lot of physical work. You have to get up to the glacier. You have to drill these holes. You have to put in all these stakes and everything. So you're this is really only happening at Sperry Glacier. It's happening a lot of places around the world and around the country. But here in the park, you're only doing it at one glacier. And I'm guessing that that's just because because it's a lot of work.

Caitlyn: Yes, it is logistically demanding. And for that reason, continuous records like this are very rare on our planet. So of the 200,000 glaciers on Earth, only one in every 10,000 has a continuous decades long mass balance record. So it really requires a commitment to repeat these measurements in a systematic way such that there is a cohesive, uninterrupted record. Which is really powerful scientifically, because then it allows us to understand those that seasonal rhythm.

Daniel: Right, because we have repeat photos. The repeat photos can tell us, Oh, look, the glacier got smaller over the past 50 years or 100 years, but it doesn't really tell us what happened in between and these measurements. You're doing the mass balance measurements. They tell you what happened in between.

Caitlyn: Exactly. And they help us to understand how the glacier responds to years where there may have been a big melt season. So a very hot, dry summer. But if there was also a big snow season preceding that, then the glacier may actually be in balance for the year or close to balance, whereas there could be years where the summer melts And sort of the lived experience of being in these mountains in the summer isn't that noteworthy. And then when we look at the cumulative record, we can start to really sort of understand the precise connection between the glacier and the ambient climate.

Daniel: So this is a fairly simple concept. You're measuring the the snow in the spring and measuring how much it melts in the fall. In my head, one of the big changes, one of the big shifts in glaciology happens with airplanes and aerial photography. Can you explain what changes? What does that allow for?

Caitlyn: When you can view the glaciers and the mountains from an aerial perspective, you gain an understanding of how the glaciers are changing across the region.

Daniel: It's too much work to go hike up to every glacier and measure how its mass balance is changing. But once you start being able to take pictures from the air, you don't know how how the mass is changing, but you could start measuring how the area of the glaciers are changing. So in my head, tell me if this is right, aerial photography or even from satellites, I guess—that's a big shift in the study of the cryosphere.

Caitlyn: Yeah, and I'd say it's true not just for the cryosphere, but for Earth sciences in general. Our ability to view our planet from a distance. We have a time series of glacier area at various snapshots starting in 1966, and that was generated by tracing the area of the glacier from aerial images. So pictures taken from airplanes provide that baseline imagery that we can then use to trace the extent of the glaciers. And then if we have aerial or satellite imagery from the modern era, we can do the same thing and then we can quantify the area change.

Daniel: The disadvantage is you don't know how much snow is falling on the glacier in the spring and you don't know how much is melting in the fall. But the advantage is you can look at all of the glaciers in the park at once. You can take pictures of them all. So that that's a huge advantage. So I guess the basis for glacier science in this area, as I understand it, is these aerial images. You have pictures of the glaciers from above. And then that coupled with the mass balance measurements that's just happening at Sperry Glacier, but happening over eighteen years. So those two things together, you start to get a pretty good picture of how things are changing.

Caitlyn: Definitely.

Daniel: And I guess the change that we're seeing is you have these pictures from 1966, and the area is getting smaller and all the glaciers. So that doesn't tell us if they're getting thinner necessarily or thicker or whatever. But it it does tell us that the area is getting smaller. So that's by area. We're talking about a measurement squared. So like square acres or square kilometers, right?

Caitlyn: Yes.

Daniel: So another thing I want to ask you about then, aerial images, that, that starts to unlock a new way of understanding the cryosphere on earth. But with satellites, it also starts unlocking, studying the cryosphere on other planets. So as a fun piece of trivia, like other planets have glaciers, right?

Caitlyn: Yes, Other planets have ice. And it's something that is definitely a point of interest, especially for the search for life on other planets.

Daniel: Oh of course

Caitlyn: There's sort of this tagline, follow the water.

Daniel: Yeah. Which is super interesting and interesting that glaciers on earth are made of rocks and water, but in other places in the solar system, they could be made of, I don't know, nitrogen or carbon dioxide.

Caitlyn: Well, and another factor to consider is like a glacier on Mars will have different dimensions than a glacier on earth because the gravitational force on Mars is different.

Daniel: I mean, the fundamental principles are still the same. But some of the numbers are going to shift because you have different gravity and. Interesting.

Caitlyn: Exactly.

Daniel: Okay. So all of that to me reinforces the importance of of approaching the science in a really quantitative way, having like, ways to really measure the glaciers.

Caitlyn: Exactly.

Daniel: Your research is on the cutting edge of those quantitative methods.

Caitlyn: Yes. So as we've described, we have this glacialogical approach. Which is very logistically demanding and time consuming, but it provides us the advantage of having seasonal information0ù so precise, a precise understanding of winter accumulation and summer ablation. But it's for one single glacier within the mountain range. And then we have the advantage of aerial photography and aerial imagery which provides information about the aerial extent of the glacier for the entire mountain range. And so photogrammetry is a technique that sort of marries the advantage of both approaches. And so photogrammetry is basically leveraging the same sort of phenomena that happens with our eyeballs, where there are two images that are offset. And if there are offset and overlapping, we can use that two dimensional information from the aerial image to sort of recreate the third dimension. And then if we repeat that exercise, say, with aerial imagery from the 1960s and satellite imagery from 2023, we have elevation information from both those years and we can difference the elevations to calculate the vertical change. And then we have a measurement of mass change across the landscape using photogrammetry. And we can compare that to our glacialogical measurements that give us the really fine tune seasonal information.

Daniel: This is kind of blowing my mind. So so basically, by taking two offset pictures of the glaciers from the air, you can use math, geometry I guess, to make a lot of different calculations about the shape, the three dimensional shape of the glaciers.

Caitlyn: Precisely.

Daniel: That's incredible. It sounds difficult to calculate.

Caitlyn: It involves specialized expertise, and actually the technology that, and the sort of workflows that the USGS Glacier Group leverages were originally developed for NASA's missions, for the Apollo missions. So for surveying the surface of the moon.

Daniel: There's all kinds of ways that studying the glaciers is being approached. We've hinted that mostly what you're observing is that glaciers are getting smaller. But let's let's talk about that. So is that true? All the lines of evidence point towards the glaciers are shrinking.

Caitlyn: Yes.

Daniel: Hmm.

Caitlyn: It's important, though, to understand that there can also be situations. Not so much for the glaciers here in Glacier National Park, but glaciers elsewhere where the dynamics aren't necessarily so sort of the flow of the ice isn't always directly coupled to what's happening with weather and snow accumulation and ice melt in any given year.

Daniel: The simple equation is like, well, it's hot in the summer so the glacier melts. If it's not super snowy in the winter, then the summer is stronger than the winter and the glacier gets smaller. But what you're saying is, yeah, that's that's generally very true. But there's there's some real nuances happening on specific glaciers that have more to do with water under the glacier, how steep is the glacier? One I've heard about is wind, right, and drifting. That's a big thing here in Glacier National Park, right?

Caitlyn: Exactly. And so one of those local processes that you just described is the wind drifting and wind scour of snow. Snow, snow, avalanche accumulation is another example. The shading of the surface from the topographic relief.

Daniel: It's not just how much snow falls in the winter. It's also like how much snow falls and then blows onto the glacier.

Caitlyn: Exactly. That redistribution of snow is a big important process for controlling the spatial variability of snow accumulation. And and so it becomes a relatively major influence on the mass balance of these small glaciers.

Daniel: Do you know off the top of your head, kind of the ballpark numbers that we're talking about, how much snow falls in the mountains of glacier versus how much drifts on top of Sperry Glacier?

Caitlyn: That's an open question. We have some ongoing studies that have quantified those different processes, like sort of the direct accumulation versus the relative accumulation, according to, or driven by wind drifts.

Daniel: Is it something like, you know, a high elevation forest in Glacier National Park is going to get a a couple of meters of snow over the winter. But the top of Sperry Glacier, where the wind's blowing, it's going to get like dozens of meters of snow, is that?

Caitlyn: One way I like to think about this topic is there is a glacier there for a reason. So, yeah, it's been favoring snow accumulation and the persistence of that frozen water mass. And that's how the ice forms to begin with. So generally, the, the location of the glaciers particularly now in a time when I mean, this the mountain range here in Glacier National Park is sparsely glacier ice to begin with. And when I say to begin with, I mean, like since 200 years ago.

Daniel: Mm hmm.

Caitlyn: And then with climate warming and conditions trending towards a climate that's less and less favorable to maintaining glacier ice on the landscape, those local processes become increasingly influential in terms of the persistence of ice.

Daniel: One thing that people think a lot about the park's glaciers is like, Oh, they're getting smaller. So as they get smaller, they're going to melt faster and faster. Like that's intuitive. Like, we think that's common sense. But your research has found that's not really quite true, that as they get smaller, they also become more shaded, they become more sheltered and they become relatively more snowdrift, you know—and wind blown snow lands on more of the glacier. So they're almost becoming more resilient as they get smaller.

Caitlyn: Yes. This question of relative vulnerability is really interesting and we're really keen to address that very question of do we see enhanced ice loss through time as the summers get warmer and warmer, or do we see more resilience as the glaciers are relegated to these shady wind-loaded spots? And what we're finding is that that resilience and that sort of niche like refugial setting has a buffering capacity that only can go so far.

Daniel: Mmhmm.

Caitlyn: So then if we once the glaciers experience sufficient melt, it just can't keep up even with that refugial setting.

Daniel: Okay, it helps the glaciers to be shaded and snow drifted and and tucked into their little cirques. But at a certain point, if the climate gets hot enough, it doesn't matter.

Caitlyn: Exactly.

Daniel: But it does seem like it would make predicting when the glaciers are going to be gone, quote, unquote. You know, that that starts to become pretty tricky when you start realizing that it's not just a uniform rate of retreat.

Caitlyn: Exactly. And that I mean, that hits the nail on the head. It's really important to understand how much ice is there to begin with, not just in the footprint, but also in the thickness. Like we do our best to represent these spatially variable processes and models, but having direct measurements of how much where actually—how much snow is actually accumulating at a location really helps us to at least start to constrain that margin of uncertainty.

Daniel: Right. Right. So we we know through a lot of lines of evidence that all of the glaciers are generally retreating and getting smaller. But saying or predicting when they'll be gone is pretty hard to calculate precisely at this point. And it also kind of depends on how you define gone and a whole bunch of other things.

Caitlyn: That's where some of these details really start to start to matter. But every sort of scientifically sophisticated, well constrained, physically informed model of the progression of glacier ice in Glacier National Park portends the continued demise of this frozen water.

Daniel: Well, to wrap up, you were just up at Sperry Glacier. What was it like up there after a winter in the office?

Caitlyn: The snowpack at Sperry Glacier this year was lower than it has been in past years, and we were struck by how much bare ice was exposed. There's this scour spot on Sperry Glacier, where we often see bare ice even in and throughout the winter. But certainly in the spring, once the melt season has started. However, the amount of bare ice that was exposed was definitely noticeably larger than it has been in the past. The other thing that was striking is that we could hear meltwater, which isn't common for the spring trip so often the spring trip, it feels more like winter still in the Sperry Glacier Basin and it definitely felt like spring. And obviously those sort of qualitative descriptions and the experience of being a human being on the landscape, that informs our sensibility of what's happening this year on Sperry Glacier with this winter mass balance. But the measurements of snow, depth and density will help us to really quantify how much snow has accumulated on the glacier. But it really seems like this melt season is proceeding a lot faster than a sort of a typical melt season.

Daniel: Sperry Glacier's melting out fast. Wow. A lot of your job is very quantitative. A lot of these complex Newtonian physics and first principles that we're talking about, programing out computer models. But it's special. And nice to catch you today right after you're coming out of the field and just having kind of the human experience on Sperry Glacier and on a on a year when it's changing particularly fast.

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Caitlyn: Yeah, we'll see. We'll have to compare it to other years where we've seen a relatively stout winter snowpack and mild, cloudy summer. So that's the beauty of having these measurements and this record all the way back to 2005. We can really put what we're seeing this year into into context. But thank you for the opportunity to speak with you. It's really nice to catch up.

Daniel: Yeah, this was a good conversation. Thanks for coming, Caitlyn.

Caitlyn: Yeah, you're welcome.

Peri: Headwaters is funded by donations to the Glacier National Park Conservancy. As an organization dedicated to supporting the park, the Conservancy funds a lot of sustainability initiatives from solar panels on park buildings to storytelling projects like this one, the Conservancy is doing critical work to prevent the worst impacts of climate change. You can learn more about what they do and about how to get involved at Glacier.org. This show is created by Daniel Lombardi. Michael Faist, Gaby Eseverri, and me, Peri Sasnett. We get critical support from Lacy Kowalski, Melissa Sladek, Kristen Friesen, and so many good people with Glacier's natural and cultural resource teams. Our music was made by the brilliant Frank Waln, and the show's cover art is by our sweet friend Stella Nall. Check out Frank and Stella's work at the links in the show notes. Besides sharing this episode with a friend who might appreciate it, you can help us out by leaving a rating and review in your podcast app. Thanks for listening.