Featured Guests  Rick McCourt (Professor, Department of Biodiversity, Earth and Environmental Science, Drexel University; Curator of Botany and Director of the Center for Systematic Biology and Evolution, Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University) and Roland Wall (Senior Director for Environmental Initiatives, Patrick Center for Environmental Research, Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University)

Host and Producer  Melinda Lewis, PhD (Associate Director, Marketing & Media)

Dean  Paula Marantz Cohen, PhD (Dean, Pennoni Honors College)                                                                                                                                 

Executive Producer  Erica Levi Zelinger (Director, Marketing & Media)

Producer  Brian Kantorek (Assistant Director, Marketing & Media)

Research and Script  Melinda Lewis, PhD

Audio Engineering and Editing  Brian Kantorek

Original Theme Music  Brian Kantorek

Production Assistance  Noah Levine

Social Media Outreach  Jaelynn Vesey

Graphic Design  Kat Heller

Logo Design  Michal Anderson

Additional Voiceover  Malia Lewis

Recorded October 28, 2022 through virtual conferencing.

Pop, the Question is a production of Marketing & Media in Pennoni Honors College at Drexel University.

The views expressed in this podcast are not necessarily those of Drexel University or Pennoni Honors College.

For more info on the Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University, visit https://ansp.org.

Copyright © 2023 Drexel University

Episode Summary

For over two centuries, the Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University has been at the forefront of scientific research in the Philadelphia metropolitan region and across the globe. Now, more than ever, the institution’s vast collections, research initiatives, and community-based projects are forging pathways to scientific understanding about the world’s natural environment and its inhabitants. Host Dr. Melinda Lewis joins two esteemed science experts from the Academy: Dr. Rick McCourt (Curator of Botany and Director of the Center for Systematic Biology and Evolution; Drexel University Professor of Biodiversity, Earth and Environmental Science) and Roland Wall (Senior Director of Environmental Initiatives for the Patrick Center for Environmental Research). This in-depth conversation addresses the impact of climate change, the accessibility of science writing in popular culture, and the greater movement for environmental justice and access to nature for all.

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TRANSCRIPT

Melinda Lewis:

Welcome to Pop, The Question, a podcast that exists at the intersection of pop culture and academia. We sit down and talk about our favorite stuff through the lenses of what we do and who we are. From Pennoni Honors College at Drexel University, Dr. Melinda Lewis here. I'm your host.

Hey, everybody. I'm here with two people representing the Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University. First, Roland Wall, the executive director of the Patrick Center for Environmental Research. Hey, Roland.

Roland Wall:

Hey, Melinda. Thanks for having us here today.

Melinda Lewis:

Of course. And Rick McCourt, professor in the Department of Biodiversity, Earth, and Environmental Science and Curator of Botany and Director of the Center for Systematic Biology at the Academy of Natural Sciences.

Rick McCourt:

Hi, Melinda. Nice to be here.

Melinda Lewis:

Of course. Thank you for being here. And we're going to talk about the environment and science writing and working across silos.

I mean, the real question that I always start with is when was the moment where you realized that the thing you're doing now was what you really enjoyed doing? Or that spark moment of whether it was like as a little kid or undergrad, where you're like, I want to pursue this type of work?

Rick McCourt:

I knew from early on that I wanted to do something with aquatic biology. I didn't call it that. I just liked Flipper on television. And so I remember writing a paper in sixth grade where I drew this beautiful picture of a dolphin and I wrote a whole page on it and I thought, that's what I want to do.

And then I grew up and figured out that Flipper had retired and jobs with marine mammals were a little hard unless you wanted to work at SeaWorld.

So I just kind of kept working on things in the ocean and then later on, in freshwater. And so it kind of grew on me in different ways. And I figured out also that in addition to loving the natural world, I liked people who also love the natural world. So I really liked the group of people I was working with and the community of scholars into it. And my focus has changed a lot, but we'll talk about that later. So I was lucky enough to sort of maintain that interest.

Melinda Lewis:

I also feel like we could do a whole episode about Flipper being a gateway towards biology. I feel like a lot of stories start with, "I really liked Flipper."

Rick McCourt:

Gateway organism. Yeah.

Roland Wall:

Let's not forget the work of Jacques Cousteau as bringing people to [inaudible 00:02:49]

Melinda Lewis:

Absolutely.

Rick McCourt:

Actually, he was pretty instrumental. I grew up when there were what, three television stations plus PBS in my state, in my hometown. And Jacques Cousteau, was on TV. And he was a magical figure actually.

Jacques-Yves Cousteau:

I feel responsible, I feel guilty as everybody else, as you should, that we are drawing blank checks on future generations. We don't pay, they are going to pay.

Melinda Lewis:

And then Roland, what about you?

Roland Wall:

My story's a little more complicated. I'm not a sort of traditional scientist. Not to say that Rick is traditional, but I think he's probably followed a little more direct career path. This is actually a second career for me. I worked for about 15 years in social services. I was a psychiatric social worker and an administrator for a nonprofit social service agency. So that was all kind of going on with me back in the 80s and 90s, early 90s. I had always been interested in the outdoors. I was a birder. I was a boater. I had done part of a biology degree. I was kind of drifting through the years in some ways, but I'd always been interested in the environment and I'd done some studies in environmental policy when I was in grad school the first time. And so I had been sort of drawn more towards kind of outdoor activities.

But it's interesting because I found this this morning, this is the book Extinction by Paul Ehrlich, Paul and Ann Ehrlich, his wife. Paul was pretty well known in the 70s. He wrote a book called The Population Bomb. It was some controversial and had some issues around predictions. But Professor Ehrlich is a very brilliant scientist. He's written extensively on environmental work. It is the Silent Spring of the 80s. So in the late 80s, I was just sitting in my backyard reading this book and it just all sort of came together for me reading this, which is really a call to action around species extinction, but also around the environment generally, including climate change. And it really, I kind of have a very clear memory of those months thinking, or the weeks that I was reading that book thinking, this is what I want to do, I got to do something in this field.

About 20 years after I read this book, Professor Ehrlich signed it for me because I was hosting him here. I had a couple opportunities actually to spend some time with him and discuss his influence on me. So that was a pretty interesting point in my life.

Melinda Lewis:

Yeah. It's incredible. I mean, to be able to meet somebody who has had such a direct influence is always really exciting. And I think it gets me to also thinking about the significance of popular writing and how we talk about complex issues to a wide audience. How do we communicate science to those who are unaware or not as knee-deep? And I'm wondering what are some texts that you have come across that you think do a good job of maintaining that balance between articulating issues and relaying those to the public?

Rick McCourt:

That's interesting. I said I didn't have any major career changes. And actually, I've changed careers about three times, but they've always kind of pivoted in a funny way to let me keep doing fun stuff. And when I was in grad school, I got a fellowship from AAAS Westinghouse I think was the co-sponsor for Mass Media Fellowship. And growing up in Tucson, Arizona, this was before the days when the New York Times could be delivered on your doorstep, the only real good national news I got was National Public Radio. And I had started listening to this weird show, All Things Considered in Morning Edition. I was kind of hooked on it and I thought they were really fun.

And this fellowship allowed me to work for WGBH in Boston, which produced all these great documentaries and stuff. And I worked on the news department because they had a daily news show. And then I started freelancing for National Public Radio itself. And this is like a dream come true. I didn't think at the time, gee, you could do this as a full-time job. So I never did. I wish I had. But I really grew up as an adult listening to the media, to people like Ira Flatow. But the NPR science reporters who are really good at communicating pretty good complex issues in more than 30 seconds sound bites because they had two and a half, three, four, five minutes to do it. So on radio, they were really interesting voices and they still are; there's still really good people doing that.

Nowadays, of course, you can do podcasts like this. You don't have to have a network supporting you. At the time, I couldn't do a radio story on astronomy for three minutes and put it on the web. There was no web. But nowadays, you can.

Neil Armstrong:

That's one small step for man, one giant leap for man.

Roland Wall:

I mean, clearly there's some classics like out Aldo Leopold's Sand County Almanac, which many people in my field will say that was the thing that they read that pushed them along. It was written in the 40s, but was, I think Rick, I'm sure you're familiar with it, it was well ahead of its time in terms of understanding on conservation and affecting people's thoughts. I think in terms of more up-to-date stuff, the Science Times had a big effect on me because it was a range of science that was in front of you in digestible bites that was, I think, well written and written by folks who have good science background.

I spent some time science writing myself, as I said, when I first started here in the 90s. And it's an exercise in saying enough but not too much. And I found the stronger my science competencies became, kind of the worse some of my writing got for conveying it because I started writing more formal science stuff. You start putting more in the sentence, you want to make sure.... And Rick, I don't know if you've had this experience as well, so...

Rick McCourt:

No, that's true. And I think scientists actually suffered from this because you're not really trained in writing. It's changing nowadays actually. There's more training in writing and speaking and talking and being interviewed and so forth like that, but it's not necessarily true. And in science, it's hard to say something that's absolutely definitive, so you always have to qualify it. But I mean, Aldo Leopold was almost a poet, I think, and he was an incredible writer.

Some other writers that I think are really interesting, Aldo's not around anymore, but we'll get to Ruth Patrick, who was part of the academy.

Roland Wall:

We can tell you stories about her at some point.

Rick McCourt:

Yeah. But one guy I really like a lot is David Quammen. David writes about natural history. And he actually dives into the basic literature of biogeography, ecology, evolution, and it pops out in a really interesting conversational way. So he used to write essays for an Outside magazine, now he writes books. He has one out that just came out about the coronavirus. But he is written about animals that are threats to humans called Monster of God, about tigers and lions and things, sort of the animals on Earth that could actually eat us if they wanted to and how they've played a role in mythology and everything else. And also about evolution itself. So he manages to make that really fascinating and I really admire him. He's done some really good work.

Roland Wall:

Well, science has to deal with uncertainty and scientists have to often qualify everything because everything has a certain level of uncertainty to it. And a lot of science is really uncertainty management. When we get into particularly some of the issues around the environment, which I know is one of the things we're going to talk about, when we're trying to say we're trying to apply science into the environmental dialogue, the sort of public dialogue, it can get lost pretty quickly as a tool if it is communicated in a way that just puts too much uncertainty into the conversation. And that's a real balance. How do we actually make sure we're being scientifically accurate and credible in what we say, but at the same time not so completely lose the path of the argument that it's not going to do any good anyway.

Melinda Lewis:

And I feel like that's a great segue into the next line of thinking, which was my sense of at least popular culture discourse is not very nuanced and that it ranges from, it's all terrible and it's all going to... And we're all going to be underwater.

Speaker 6:

It's a chilling view of a vital piece of history. Independence Hall in Philadelphia in a future overtaken by too much water.

Melinda Lewis:

Versus everything is fine, stop worrying about it, we've had these conversations forever. And it's really hard to know where in the balance we are. How do you, particularly in your positions at the academy and at the university, try to cut through all of this noise?

Rick McCourt:

It's pretty difficult. I think Roland working at the Patrick Center for Environmental Research, which is kind of our ecology side of the house if you want to call it that. I'm more on the sort of evolution, natural history, but they come together in an interesting way. I think we we'll talk about that.

But it's interesting, when I started to get into this, I liked Flipper. I mentioned him before. In my generation, you could be kind of geek out and just say, "If I could only get to some part of the natural world that's undisturbed, I could really figure out what's going on." And over the past couple of decades, it's been the case that there is no such place on the planet anymore. There's no part that's unaffected by us. There's no part that is a little bit under or a lot under threat. And so you're dragged maybe kicking and screaming to some extent into the side of how to save this, which is how Roland got in this [inaudible 00:11:48] reading Paul Ehrlich stuff about extinction. Of course, Paul Ehrlich was a basic biologist psychologist before he became a bestselling author and figured out, hey, we're all at risk here.

Roland Wall:

And he was a volunteer at the academy in the 1950s, by the way.

Rick McCourt:

Oh really? He was. Okay.

Roland Wall:

That was how I actually made the connection.

Rick McCourt:

[inaudible 00:12:04] worked for Ruth. Yeah, Ruth was...

Roland Wall:

He did, I think.

Rick McCourt:

Which is pretty amazing. A lot of famous people have gone through the academy one way or another.

But I actually go between those two extremes you were talking about, Melinda. So occasionally I get up and read the paper and I'll go, "It's kind of game over. I might as well just enjoy the fall weather while I can because it's not going to last much longer." To other times when this week the guy's writing an article in the Sunday magazine in the New York Times saying, "It's not quite as bad as it used to be. I used to think there'd be hurricanes, floods, war and famine. Now I think just maybe hurricanes and floods." And I don't know if that's going to be true or not, but it was an interesting, almost quasi optimistic take on things. And when I'm talking to students, I figure I can't just say, "We're all doomed, now what?" which is the title of an interesting book actually.

You have to think, what can you do? I just read a book called Hurricane Lizards and Plastic Squid by a guy named Thor Hanson. He talked to Gordon Orians, who was a longtime ecologist at the University of Washington. He said, "Well, what can we do about climate change and thinking about it?" And his response was, "Everything you can," which was an interesting take on it. So it's like, well, don't give up, do everything you can and don't despair that just because you used 5% less plastic bags this year, well, that's better than nothing. And then there are other things you can do in other spheres that might have an even bigger effect, but do what you can and maintain some sort of feeling that no matter how bad it could be, it could be not as bad if I do something to counteract.

Greta Thunberg:

We will not let you get away with this. Right here, right now is where we draw the line. The world is waking up and change is coming whether you like it or not. Thank you.

Roland Wall:

Just to give you a little background, the Patrick Center, which was founded by Dr. Ruth Patrick, who we've mentioned a couple of times who was a bit of a force of nature in the 20th century, really, one of the pioneers of aquatic ecology as a science and the idea of looking at human impacts on aquatic systems. And so that's really what we do. We actually do a lot of externally focused work on problems, on trying to look at how science can be applied to human impact. We do other somewhat more basic science as well, of course, but a lot of our work is really focused on what people need to know to try to make things better, particularly on aquatic system streams and rivers. That was really where Dr. Patrick got started.

So I think there's a problem in the US sometimes that we tend to look at environmental action through the consumer lens; gee, if we just bought less of this or did that or the other, that's my bit for the environment. I think the environment the way it is, it's a collective entity and we all have to be working together on it. So while it's fine to change your light bulbs and recycle your trash and all those things are good, if you really want to think about what you can do effectively around the environment, it's really thinking more about institutional community collective kind of actions starting with voting. I mean, I won't endorse one way or the other, but certainly if you're interested in the environment, be interested in what your candidates are saying.

But even if it's something as small as being part of a community garden or being part of your local watershed protection association, whatever it may be, the environment, even though we think about it on a global level, we think about these big problems on a global level, it really presents locally for the most part. And people's interactions with the environment are for the most part local. And so the place you start thinking about where you can have your actions is local. And that's not anything original. I mean, "think globally, act locally" has been on bumper stickers since I was a child, but that would be my thought if people are looking for ways to impact things.

Speaker 8:

Hey, it's your mom. I have a question about that podcast you do. Are you on the Instagram or the Twitter or the Facebook? If I have an idea for a podcast, how do I get in touch with you? Love you. Bye.

Melinda Lewis:

Sup, mom. Yeah. So you can find us on all those things actually, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook. Just go to popquestpod on any one of those and follow. If you want to send us ideas, you can either go over to our website and leave us a message at popqpodcast, or you can get us directly at Pop2@Drexel.edu. You can actually find us on iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher. I can help set it up when I get home, but then you have to promise me to [inaudible 00:16:51] with you. All right, love you. Bye.

How is climate change specifically affecting Philadelphia and the region? Are there certain issues that make Philadelphia particularly vulnerable?

Roland Wall:

We've gotten a lot more involved looking at climate change lately in the last five or 10 years. In the past, climate change has sort of looked at through the lens of climate modelers and people who were climate scientists. In a sense, we're all climate scientists right now, and particularly in ecology, where the two master variables are precipitation and temperature, clearly those are the things that are going to change over time. So we've spent a lot of time thinking about climate and what it means. There's certainly ways that Philadelphia is vulnerable. It sits on a river, and so it's going to be affected by flooding issues.

George Stephanopoulos:

... rescues were needed to save people from the floods. Janai Norman is on the scene in Philadelphia. Good morning, Janai.

Janai Norman:

George, good morning. I would never be able to safely stand here on the Vine Street Expressway, a major thoroughfare through Philadelphia, but it is completely flooded this morning, still. Crews hauled in the pumps yesterday. They tell us that they have been working through the night, pumping thousands of gallons of water a minute. They're making some progress. The water is beginning to recede, but it is still just a massive mess here from that record rise and the rainfall yesterday, the Schuylkill River here rising about 10 feet in just over 12 hours overflowing its banks, flooding streets, swamping cars, and prompting water rescues, the National Guard using high [inaudible 00:18:34]

Roland Wall:

One of the interesting things with Philadelphia, and it's not unique to Philadelphia but it is unique to large cities in a way, and we can walk from this over to the issue of equity and environmental justice, cities get hotter than the surrounding areas. It's called the urban heat island effect. It's been known for many years. Even before climate change became an issue, we knew that because of pavement, because of the loss of trees, because of machinery operating and traffic, cities are just hotter and they're hotter particularly at night than the surrounding countryside, which can be a problem. Within cities though, some parts get much hotter than others. And if you look at times of heat emergencies, some communities are going to be much more affected than others. And not surprisingly, those tend to be poorer communities, often communities of color that are going to get more impact. And that's again, due to a lot of issues: patterns of development, redlining of mortgages, all the historical issues of segregation, all the development plans where some areas just have a lot more pavement and a lot less trees.

Speaker 11:

An update now on your NBC10 First Alert Weather, get ready for another frosty night in many neighborhoods.

Speaker 12:

And despite these cold temperatures, the weather is overall much warmer. Steve's here to explain what we're talking about.

Steve Sonsa:

You know how time can be tricky. Over the years things change and that's exactly what's happened with the climate. So you think of climate change and you think, everything's down the road, that's when we're in trouble. But I'm here to tell you it's already happening and we have the stats to prove it. That's what we do in science, we look at numbers and trends, and that's what I'm here to show you. So what's going on here? Well, partially climate change. You have that urban heat island effect, all the buildings, the streets, keeping everything warm. And in this kind of weather, you can get bit by mosquitoes even into November. So, changing climate of course is happening in Philadelphia, but we have to think of this at a global scale because that's what's [inaudible 00:20:30]

Roland Wall:

And so that's a big issue in Philly and the city has taken actions on it because if you look at what's called the heat vulnerability map of the city of Philadelphia, certain areas just pop out. And so trying to mitigate or figure out ways to support and adapt there are important. That's an issue in almost all cities.

Rick McCourt:

And the science side of the academy has a couple of arms, so to speak, or sometimes when we talk about them as silos, when we feel a negative point of view. But I...

Roland Wall:

Well, look, Rick, we're both here together.

Rick McCourt:

We're both here. No, no. Roland and I are drilling holes in those silos because actually the ways to look at the climate issue is that there's a past, present and future, and we're all concerned about all of them. In a way, I'm in the side of the academy where we have 19 million specimens of plants, animals, fungi, all sorts of different things, microbes, that we preserve. They have things in them and interesting information and data associated with them that can be used to address aspects of climate change. They go way back to the fossil record like millions of years, not just hundreds or thousands.

And so what you can tell from the collections and also just ecology, all this stuff talking about the natural world requires different perspectives. And so there's applied ecologists, basic and collections people. The way animals adapt to and plants adapt to the environment is Thor Hanson's book about Hurricane Lizards and Plastic Squid, again, just has a big effect on me because I read it last week. They move, they adapt or they perish. And there might be another option in there as well. But that can happen.

And if you think about it, that's what we do too. If it gets too hot in a part of the city, you either move or you adapt because you can get an air conditioner, or you don't do very well and you, well, you may go locally extinct by moving if you're a human. We don't often think of it just dying, but you can die from it. But humans are going to adapt the same way. When Roland's talking about environmental justice and equitability, that applies to a global scale. Climate change is going to affect less economically developed countries than more economically developed. And that happens on a neighborhood by neighborhood basis too. Poor people are not just in Bangladesh, they're in parts of Philadelphia and they don't have air conditioners or they have substandard housing or below a floodplain or whatever.

And so moving, adapting, and perishing is what we're kind of all faced with in that sense. So there's all sorts of information that can be used to figure out how have things changed in the past, how are they changing now, and what are the differences in that? And so you need knowledge about what the animals are doing, animals and plants are doing now, and you also need to have some verifiable evidence of where they were before. And we have that. We have, on the floor in our museum, there's a bug that was collected at city hall. It's an aquatic beetle. What it was doing at city hall in 1900 when it was collected, I'm not sure, but we know it was there because we have some evidence of it. And so putting together those little bits and pieces of information can answer some of the questions that's necessary to figure out, hey, how things are changing now and how quickly and what might happen in the future.

Speaker 14:

Climate change as we know it today is changing our Earth's overall temperature with massive and permanent ramifications. Although its consequences can be planet threatening. Scientists still believe there are things we can do on a personal level to help: recycle and reuse things, walk or use public transportation to get to work, turn off your electronics when you're not using them, eat less meat, while you're at it, eat more locally grown vegetables and foods, and last but not least, spread your knowledge and concerns about climate change with others. When it comes to climate change, the main takeaway is that it's real. And although we are part of the cause, we can also be part of the solution.

Roland Wall:

One area where the two science groups in the academy come together is actually Rick's field, which is the study of algae. And that's not something people think a whole lot about. It's algae, it's scum on a pond, what does it mean? And Rick can speak to this at much greater detail than I can, the importance of understanding the presence or absence of particular species of algae, what that means in terms of the condition of the water.

Really the original work of Ruth Patrick was looking at diatoms, which are a microscopic algae species. And diatoms in particular, because they have these glass shells, they last a long time. I mean, their remnants will last a long time. And I think both sides of the academy have done this and done it together, have done core samples of sediment and other things and looked at how the distribution of algae species have changed over time over hundreds or thousands of years. And that gives us also a signal as to what's going on either in terms of the water quality or in terms of the temperature or whatever else it may be in the environments that's affecting them.

Rick McCourt:

More and more of it's making the science times because of... Usually you make news when you're about to hurt somebody or you're edible. And algae are kind of both. So every university in the country has some biofuels project where they're trying to grow algae in suboptimal water supplies or in habitats that are kind of harsh for it, like deserts out in the shallow ponds, to use the biomass for biofuel, or to use specialty chemicals from them. They make beta-carotene. You can add that to animal food and to chickens to make their yolks yellower and stuff, on a less significant basis. And algae also are often the culprit in freshwater bodies where there's pollution and influx of nutrients from maybe too much agricultural chemicals or wastes from other places.

And algae are pretty resilient, at least some of them are. And so they'll kind of tell you what you're putting in the water because algae will bloom and can take advantage of that, if there's too much nitrogen or too much phosphate or something like that. And so you can look and see from the algae that are there, how much is going on.

And also sometimes they'll be the type of algae called bluegreen algae. They're actually a type of bacteria that's photosynthetic. And they can produce toxins and they shut down cities. I think it was Erie, a city on Lake Erie, they had to shut down and they produce toxins that you can't just boil away. They don't get deactivated by boiling; they stick around. And so that's why people had to drink bottled water there for quite a while.

And I'd say Ruth Patrick was a real pioneer in this. She had a real vision for these little tiny things that you might just say, "Oh, you can't even see them in a glass of water if you have a few billion of them in there." But she recognized that you need to know what they look like, what they are. And guess what, when certain species grow, it indicates you have polluted water or it indicates your water's healthy. And she basically pioneered that idea and it's still used today.

Roland Wall:

Two doors down, right now, there's somebody counting the number of algae species on a slide, probably on a contract we have with one of the state environmental protection agencies. Because that methodology of using organisms to track water quality is, as Rick says, it's fundamental still for most regulation now is looking at either algae or insects or whatever the life forms may be. That was Dr. Patrick's real, I suppose, eureka moment, was coming across with the idea that the more impacted a streamer river was, the less diverse the organisms were or that the certain organisms would leave and others would come in. And that's going back to the 1940s or 50s when that was really being developed. But that use of a multidisciplinary, whole system look at a stream to determine how much pollution there was really work that started here with her work.

Rick McCourt:

She worked as a volunteer first because of course as a young female, she could not be hired as a scientist. But then she ended up changing the place.

Roland Wall:

I've sometimes said she was always too far ahead of her time. I mean, she got her PhD in the 30s when there weren't really very many women that did that. There wasn't really a community of people for her to interact with, so she just had to go out on her own and built a whole field of study around that.

Rick McCourt:

I think one of the tricks was she grew up somewhat privileged, but maybe because of that, or who knows why, she didn't seem to wait around for people to give her permission to do things. She did them. I think if you wait for permission, you were not going to get much done.

Melinda Lewis:

Is that the ethos of the academy?

Rick McCourt:

Permission can't wait? [inaudible 00:28:24] What is the ethos of the academy? That's a good question, Roland. What do you think?

Roland Wall:

It's a complicated institution. We have a lot of different things going on at once. Rick, referred to the issue with silos, so we're always trying to figure out ways to break those down. We have collection science, we have other kinds of curatorial work, environmental science going on. We have a great group of educators and public facing folks who work in the public facing the museum. So what's our tagline now? Be a force for nature. I think everybody here has that in some way or the other in their mind.

And people stay here a really long time. I'm going on 23 years now, Rick, I don't know what yours is, but...

Rick McCourt:

A couple more than that.

Roland Wall:

And we've got people that that've been here, 30, 40. One chemist just passed his 50th year here. So there's a lot of loyalty to the idea that nature is important and that the environment is important. And so I think that's really what's kept this institution going through 200 years.

Rick McCourt:

Some of it's an attitude of even though we're pretty small institution in some ways, we're older than the Smithsonian, for example, but we're much smaller. We could fit into one of their closets I would like to say, or one of their warehouses. But in a way we have this incredible history and collection of scientists and experts of various things including outreach to the public and educating a public about that. And so nowadays the question is sort of why not us? If anybody's going to study the effect of heat islands in Philadelphia, well why not us? Who else is doing it? And if some other giant consortium is doing it, we can be part of that. But if it's an important question, we have the expertise and we have the knowledge and background to do it, why don't we do it? So we don't constrain ourselves in that way, but figure out what kind of tools do we have and what are the problems that we can solve with.

Roland Wall:

We also have a great public face because we are one of the anchor institutions for culture in the city. We're on Logan Square near the Franklin Institute as everyone reminds us, but somewhat smaller. Nonetheless, we have the ability when we're doing things like mapping heat in the city to bring a public angle to that as well. So that's important as well I think.

Rick McCourt:

The concept of a natural history museum and museums in general and scientists in general is really changing in many ways. So that it used to be if you wanted to study dinosaurs or plants or something, you study them in nature and then in order to get a better handle sometimes you need to look at the things that don't run away from you or are going to die on you in the springtime. And so you looked at specimens in museums. And you'd have to go there to see them, or if you really couldn't get there, they might ship them to you for a loan. Now, that data is kind of dispersed all over the internet because we've taken pictures of things, we've captured all the information on the labels and so forth attached to them, and sometimes digitize the field notebooks of the scientists who caught them or collected them. And also you have the name, which means you can go Google Scholar everything and figure out all the publications that are not in the library, they're in your desktop now.

And beyond that, we have DNA data. The genetic material in the cells is actually preserved many times in all the collections we have. Biochemicals within the specimens themselves or be isotopes of chemicals in bird feathers that can tell you where they were foraging, what they were eating and when, because you know the date they were collected. So that concept of an extended specimen and extended data, extended data sets, is really kind of changing things.

In this glorious world of the future, maybe, we'll have specimens we'll have connected to ecological data sets that are long-term studies and maybe even modern day present time monitoring, with data cams in webs in lakes where you can tell what the temperature is in some lake right now and then study the organisms there. All that stuff is being networked and is being made more powerful in order to answer questions, not just to be a mega gee whizz, isn't this cool, and I will sit back and watch it, but what are the questions you want to ask? How can you solve a problem and learn more about something? And bringing all that data information together is important. And that happens globally, but it happens within our institution as well. So it's an exciting, cool time to be approaching retirement, I'll tell you that.

Roland Wall:

What's changed as well is how museums relate to the public and to the audiences and things. And I think it's important what Rick was saying about the internet, as radical as that may be, it has actually played a huge role in some of this. But it's also, museums traditionally have been defined as, if you look at Webster or whatever, their first thing is, a building that has artifacts or a building that has things in it or building that collects things. But the building often is the first term in the definition. Most modern museums would reject that out of hand. The building is not what makes the museum, it's the people, it's the ideas, it's the knowledge that's coming out of it and it's its interaction with the public. The museum can exist anywhere. We do work in West Philly, we do work with school systems. Our museum is anywhere we go.

So we've been doing a lot of work in the last few years, particularly around inclusion and diversity and what we call community science and environmental justice, which all play different parts in this. So we began this year, a community learning division. We have a new vice president for that. And a lot of that work is about taking the kind of things that Rick does or the collections do or that my team does, and connect it better with the people who actually live in the city and the groups that in the past haven't been very well-connected to it.

Melinda Lewis:

I'm trying to conceptualize what Rick said earlier in our conversation, but how can we be better to our surrounding environment? What can we push for or think about more in terms of making our environment more equitable and really even just engaging in these conversations because I don't think that equity is... I think we're talking about it more, but I still think that people aren't thinking about the environment as an equity issue popularly.

Rick McCourt:

Yeah. I think it's becoming more and more. I mean, Roland and I are exposed to it all the time, especially Roland's projects in his side of the house there. And we have different initiatives that reach out to different parts of the city sometimes about environmental problems that they've identified and would like some input and information about, and other things are just issues that come up. There's a big, big issue in the news in the last year, I guess, about Black birders in New York City. But there're Black birders all over the place, including here in Philadelphia. And we had a big black tie event at the Academy for Black birders, and we had hundreds of people show up and mostly African American folks who were interested in birds.

Speaker 15:

There are essential tools for birding. They're your binoculars, your spotting scope, your field guide, and if you're Black, you're going to need probably two or three forms of ID. The edge of day as light as fading, those corpuscular hours are the times when many birds come to life. It's such a beautiful time to bird. But if you're a Black birder and you're going to bird at night, you better be careful because you might be perceived as being up to no good.

Roland Wall:

There are questions generally about access to nature and what that means for different groups and why some groups relate to nature or seem to relate to nature differently than others. And what allows us to get people better connected if they aren't already, or recognizing that many people are already better connected to nature than we understand, but we in the cocoon don't always realize it. So I think the Black birder movement wasn't something we started. It was something we learned about and something we should have learned about much sooner.

Speaker 16:

Anything that you do in the realm of birding is birding. If you have a bird feeder in the backyard. That's birding. You don't have to have binoculars to be considered a birder. So just know that you going outside is good enough.

Roland Wall:

One of the interesting, from our side of the house in terms of water, so if we think about the Delaware River that runs through the City of Philadelphia, most people don't go near it. I mean, it's had a twisted history in terms of pollution and things, but a good deal of the Delaware River and certainly a good deal of the Delaware Basin is now considered usable for swimming and fishing and other kinds of recreational work or recreational activities. The only area that isn't is sort of the 20 some mile stretch that runs along Philadelphia and Camden and Wilmington because of issues with sewage treatment and things like that over the years that you still have these issues with pollution of the river.

So a big question right now is how do we build access to nature for people, whether it's the stream that runs through their neighborhood or the river that runs through their city? Or how do we just make more open space and more green space available? And I know that's something that's well recognized in Philadelphia but we haven't quite solved it yet, but it definitely is the driver for a lot of thinking right now.

Rick McCourt:

I'll give you one other example too, of something that I've been involved with recently, and I'll use an anecdote from it. So in a room at the academy, I can open a folder and inside is a plant. It's a dead plant specimen. And you might say, okay, it's an interesting tobacco plant, or it's a lily. You wouldn't think, well, what does that have to do with diversity, equity, inclusion, and all the things that society's been paying a lot of attention to lately? Well, it turns out the plant was collected from an area where the Native Americans 200 years ago used it for treating wounds or for food. And now we have the specimen in the museum. What is the connection? Well, the Native Americans are still there, the plants are still there, their uses are still there. They don't know that we have this specimen perhaps. Actually the one I'm thinking of, there were several of them collected by Lewis and Clark on their expedition.

And we have started partnering with people who are interested in this from the legal perspectives and cultural anthropological perspectives. And there are ways to connect to Native American communities now, to say, "Look, we have these specimens. They might be of interest to you. They might be of interest to you from the standpoint of cultural uses, history of where they were, and maybe even from the standpoint of modern biology. You might want to know something about ethnobiology of plants; where they come from, what they're used for, and what's what their potential use is in the future," is something I never would've thought of a couple of years ago. But because of my exposure to a few people who are interested in this, I thought, actually we have 19 million specimens. Many of them were collected from lands owned by and run by indigenous people 100 to 200 years ago. Or even if they're collected now, the lands were there that long ago. What are the connections between those people?

So those things, they're intertwined. They're not completely divorced. This little plant on a page is dead and just sitting there kind of innocently has a big story behind it and a lot of stories to tell.

Roland Wall:

When you're a 200-year-old museum, particularly a natural history museum that has been connected to the movement of empires around the world, there's a lot of history, there's a lot of baggage there, and I think we do have to acknowledge these issues and work to correct them, and certainly to make the modern identity of the museum something different.

Melinda Lewis:

I'm continually impressed by the work that's being done by you all. You've put me a little bit more at ease, so I appreciate that very much. Thanks for hanging out.

Roland Wall:

People don't often tell us that. That's good. Usually it's like, "Why are you so depressing?"

Rick McCourt:

Yeah, I had a great time. It was fun. It was lots of fun.

Roland Wall:

Yeah, it's been fun. Thanks a lot.

Melinda Lewis:

Pop, The Question was researched and hosted by Dr. Melinda Lewis. Our theme music and episodes are produced by Brian Kantorek, with additional audio production by Noah Levine. All of this was done under the directorship of Erica Levi Zelinger, the deanship of Dr. Paula Marantz Cohen, and the Pennoni Honors College at Drexel University.