[00:00:00] Crystal: Want to know how you too can be a force for nature? Head on over to forcesfornature.com and sign up to receive a free guide with practical actions that you can start taking today. I’m Crystal DiMiceli and welcome to the Forces for Nature show.

Do you find yourself overwhelmed with all the doom and gloom you hear of these days? Do you feel like you, as just one person can’t really make a difference? Forces for Nature cuts through that negativity. In each episode, I interview somebody who’s doing great things for animals and the environment. We talked through the problem they’re addressing, the solution they have found, what keeps them going, and we’ll leave you with practical action tips so that you too can become a force for [00:00:45] nature.

Hello friends. It feels so good to be sitting back in front of the microphone. I missed telling these stories and sharing these forces of nature with you. My little season break lasted longer than I had anticipated. As you might remember, we had just moved to Rome, Italy in May of last year. And I needed some time to get acquainted with the life here. Just figuring out how to set up an internet line in a foreign country in a new language can be a monumental task in and of itself. But, getting into a groove didn’t take as long as this break lasted.

I’m not going to lie. I ended up just wanting to enjoy la dolce vita. In other words, the sweet life that Italy is so skilled at providing. We had a steady stream of visitors, too, who wanted to enjoy with us. And I wanted to soak up every moment I could with them. Having lived abroad for the past decade. Whoa, gosh, it’s already been a decade.

Having lived abroad for so long, you don’t get to see all the people you love as often as you’d like to do so. So when they visited, I just wanted to enjoy the moment with them. But, I’m back, and I’m excited for what the season has in store. Today, for one, I’m going to introduce you to one of my favorite additions to the show.

Her name is Emma Illick Frank. And I’d like to say that she is a good news journalist. I’m tired of only hearing the bad things that are happening to our environment and to animals. And I assume you are too. Those stories are what grab attention and make headlines. But if you just scratch below the surface of those headlines, you can find some really inspiring things going.

I highlight many already by talking with the forces of nature who come on the show, but I wanted to hear more. And that’s what Emma is here to do. She’s going to pop in a couple of times this season and let us know about some great things that are happening out there. And if you’ve been following the Instagram and Facebook accounts, you’ll see that I’ve been adding even more good news stories there.

The way that I look at it, the more you learn about what’s working, the more hopeful and inspired you’ll be to make the changes the world needs. At least that’s how I work. So without further ado, let me introduce you to Emma.

Crystal: Hi Emma. Thank you so much for joining me on forces for nature. It’s so great to have you.

[00:03:11] Emma: Thanks for having me, Crystal. It’s great to be here.

[00:03:13] Crystal: I’m excited to do this segment with you today because I wanted to highlight the good news that is happening out there. We don’t hear enough about it. And I believe that the more that we know of them, the more that we can scale them up and make them the norm.

So let’s just dive right in and get to it.

[00:03:31] Emma: Absolutely, you know, in researching good news stories for this podcast, I actually came across such a plethora of stories. And I think normally I’m so immersed in like the doom and gloom of it all. I wasn’t expecting there to [00:03:45] be so many success stories. I actually had to kind of pick and choose which ones to talk about.

So today I have three stories. About beavers, California, Condors and Monarch butterflies. And so I think I’ll get started with the beavers just because I feel beavers are kind of charismatic animal that everyone can get on board with. They’re mammals, they build dams, they’re quite well known. But not many people know that beavers in the UK actually went extinct in the 16th century and people were using them for furs. They were using their scent glands for perfume and for [00:04:30] flavoring, which it’s, while you say, Ooh, but you know, it still happens today. Artificial vanilla and raspberry flavor come from these scent glands and beavers, and the beavers use the glands to mark their territory.

But humans use them for candle scents, for vanilla ice cream. The use really runs the gamut and not many people know that they come from beaver scent glands. And not just scent glands, but actually anal scent glands. Now in the past, beavers were killed to harvest this oil. It was called castorium, but today they’re actually milked, which is, I think you can say is even grosser.

[00:05:10] Crystal: Really? Okay. There are beaver farms that are specifically meant for this product. Oh, okay. Yeah, you know. I learn something new every day. Continue.

[00:05:24] Emma: This is the dark underbelly of beavers today. And I mean that quite literally.

[00:05:33] Crystal: Um, so when you see all natural flavoring that is considered the all natural flavoring?

[00:05:37] Emma: Yeah. It, it falls under the category of natural flavoring. The FDA calls it a natural flavor, you know, it’s, it’s an animal by-product so. I can see on your face. You’re very disturbed to see. I hope [00:06:00] that this doesn’t mitigate your happiness to hear that, in fact, beavers have returned to the UK!

[00:06:10] Crystal: That’s the good news in this story! Got it. Good. Let’s pivot to that!

[00:06:12] Emma: After 400 years, beavers are finally making a comeback in the UK. There was one pair discovered in Devin, and now there’s a really rigorous kind of mating and rerelease program.

And they are coming to all parts of the UK. There’s a huge population in Scotland now. But, what a lot of people don’t know is that beaver dams create a whole ecosystem for lots of other animals. So when a beaver dams a river, it [00:06:45] basically starts trapping silt that flows down the river and plants can start growing there.

Basically, beavers can single handedly or maybe single toothedly, create a wetland from a river and wetlands are incredibly biodiverse. They are carbon sinks, so they help mitigate the effects of climate change. And another thing that they mitigate is flood risk. So when a river flows straight, the water can move much more rapidly than if there is a dam impeding the movement of the water.

So by putting a dam in the middle of a river, It slows down water and it slows down flooding there’s even an example of a village, I believe in Bavaria, where they were going to put in a million dollar [00:07:30] dam and then a couple of beavers moved in upstream and all of their flood risk was completely mitigated. They didn’t have to build the dam.

[00:07:38] Crystal: I mean, that’s ecosystem services at its best right there.

[00:07:42] Emma: Absolutely. Now some people, especially in the UK are a little worried that the dams are actually going to cause flood risk because they’re stopping up rivers, but there are lots of things that communities are doing, including putting discreet pipes underneath the beaver dams to allow the water to continue through and kind of encircling trees with wire mesh so that the beavers can’t chop them down. So that’s the first success story. After several centuries, beavers coming back to a [00:08:15] native habitat, there’s over 400 pairs in the UK now, and they are just making life better for everyone.

[00:08:22] Crystal: Do you happen to know the status of beavers in other places.

[00:08:26] Emma: I don’t, I don’t think that they’re endangered in the United States.

I think there’s just a lot more habitat for them versus in the UK where they were just really hunted to extinction in the 15 hundreds.

[00:08:40] Crystal: And so there was an effort by individuals to reintroduce them.

[00:08:44] Emma: Yes. Yeah. There was a pair discovered in Devin and that kind of like provoked them to start breeding them and re-releasing them across the country.

Scotland has several thousand pairs. So I think that maybe some of them were taken from there.

[00:08:59] Crystal: [00:09:00] Oh, great. Please go on.

[00:09:03] Emma: Okay, so next I want to talk about Monarch butterflies, which I think are very charismatic insect, especially in the Western United States where they migrate over the course of a year as part of their kind of flight pattern and the way that they reproduce.

They end up in California and other states every year and, every year, around Thanksgiving, there is a big Monarch butterfly count. Now over the past many, many years, The numbers of monarchs have been plummeting. And it’s really sad. I think all insect populations across the world have really been suffering and ecologists are worried that [00:09:45] this could be kind of foreshadowing for wider systems collapsed.

So it’s really a very dire situation. And Monarch specifically have declined 99.9% since 1980 to their population now, which is terrible. However, last year there was an over 100 fold increase in their numbers compared to 2020. So, whereas in 2020, less than 2000 monarchs were counted around Thanksgiving time. In California in 2021, it was over 240,000, which is really great. And there are many theories as [00:10:30] to why, but no one is totally sure. So one thing is that predators have kind of stopped bothering eating Monarch butterflies. They’re like, there’s just not enough of this food source. And so they’re no longer desirable prey.

Another theory is that the insect population itself as responding to scarcity of numbers and they are laying more eggs than usual. And. Scientists can’t really explain why this is happening. There’s so much that is unknown about insects and really all animals kind of innate knowledge. They seem to be reproducing much faster than usual.

But I think that the most optimistic take is that the average [00:11:15] person got on board and started planting milkweed, and milkweed is a flowering plant that Monarch butterflies need to reproduce. They will only lay eggs on milkweed and what’s happened over the last couple of decades is that as farmers have used more pesticides and herbicides, select herbicide-resistant crops. And then they obliterate the whole field with herbicides. And so milkweed, which normally grows in the rows between the crops has been killed.

[00:11:48] Crystal: And because it’s, it’s a weed, it’s something that people don’t necessarily want.

[00:11:51] Emma: Right. Exactly. It’s what farmers don’t want, but it’s actually a great shrub to have in your yard. And what a [00:12:00] lot of people have been doing is planting milkweed in their yards. Monarch, butterflies are coming in and one nursery in Southern California said that they sold, actually, I believe they gave away 16,000 milkweed plants just this year. So people are really getting on board and really stepping up to help the Monarch population, which I think is super inspiring

[00:12:23] Crystal: For sure. And I wonder if there is the connection that it happened over the year of 2020. Maybe people were home and they decided, well, now’s a great time for me to start a garden. So it’s one little silver lining out of, out of that mess.

[00:12:41] Emma: Yeah, absolutely. It could be. There’s one cautionary [00:12:45] thing about planting milkweed though, which is there are two species of milkweed that can grow in the US. There’s the native kind and then there’s the tropical kind, which doesn’t die over the winter. The problem with the tropical kind is when the Monarch butterflies come to land, especially in the Western US, unless the milkweed starts dying, they might not leave and they need to make that migration. It’s very essential for their reproduction.

The other downside of the tropical milkweed is that milkweed sometimes carries a parasite that can infect Monarch butterflies. When milkweed dies every year, the parasite is killed. And so its numbers are reduced, but if milkweed is to survive, the parasite survives as well, and that can be a real threat to Monarch butterfly.

So [00:13:30] to those who are listening, if you plan to plant milkweed, make sure it’s the native kind.

[00:13:34] Crystal: And do you just ask a plant nursery for that specifically?

[00:13:39] Emma: Yeah, plant nurseries have them that you can, you can purchase them. You can also get seed kits, various non-profits will distribute kind of a pollinator kit with different seeds.

A lot of milkweeds, some other plants. In fact, some recent scientific literature shows that milkweed that’s planted. Other plants such as flowers actually is better for Monarch butterflies, that they’ll, they’ll lay more eggs in. They’re more comfortable on that milkweed. So you can get one of these starter kits in the mail, or you can go to a local nurseries.

[00:14:12] Crystal: For the listener as well. Just so you know, if [00:14:15] you have a, a Monarch butterfly passing through your yard, they are the ones there are between, I believe, two and four inches across, and they’re bright orange with black stripes. And then, uh, the caterpillars have yellow, black and white bands, and then their cocoons are this beautiful sea foam green with these yellow dots.

It’s quite a colorful animal through all the stages of its life. And it’s very beautiful.

[00:14:43] Emma: It’s super beautiful. And I didn’t know this before, but apparently the milkweed, they get a toxin from it that makes them taste disgusting to predators. So they are slightly poisonous as well.

[00:14:55] Crystal: And did you mentioned the migration of this animal? It’s one of the coolest migrations out there because of its size.

[00:15:03] Emma: It’s amazing. And Monarch butterflies go through four generations over the course of a single year, which basically means that the course of their migration, you know, from Mexico to the US, there are individuals who are doing a migration they’ve never done before, who are born in one spot, die in another, and then their progeny are, you know, born at point B and continue onwards. So, a generational feet that isn’t fully understood.

[00:15:32] Crystal: So it’s not that one individual making their way from Canada and the us down to Mexico. It’s successional generations doing that.

[00:15:42] Emma: It’s successive generations. One [00:15:45] butterfly could go from US to Mexico, but that same butterfly wouldn’t be flying back. They live for about six months each.

[00:15:52] Crystal: Really neat animals and super easy for us to protect them. Because even if you’re in an apartment, you can have a window box and plant milkweed in a window.

[00:16:02] Emma: Absolutely. And you would be supporting not only Monarch butterflies, but other pollinators as well. And there is a real pollinator crisis going on, especially in the U S right now. So anything you can do to help is really great.

[00:16:15] Crystal: Definitely. Let’s move on to the third story that you mentioned.

[00:16:19] Emma: So this story is about the California condor. Now I will say, if you look at a picture of the California condor, it is not necessarily as charismatic as say the [00:16:30] Monarch butterfly, but this species is so important, not just for ecological reasons, also for cultural and spiritual reasons.

So I wanted to talk about the story because it’s an example of a great stakeholder effort between the national park service of the U S, the fish and wildlife service, and also the Yurok tribe, which is an indigenous tribe in the Western United States. Now the California condor has a lot of cultural significance to this tribe.

It’s feathers and songs are foundational components of Yurok ceremonious, and it’s spiritually tied to the tribe. It’s considered sacred. [00:17:15] I think that something that’s often forgotten when we look back at the history of the United States, not only did European settlers really conduct a genocide against indigenous people in the United States, but in addition to that, they really committed ecocide.

They took an environment and plants that were sacred to indigenous people and completely desecrated them in many, many ways. And so this partnership I think, is very symbolic and in bringing the California condor back to the Western United States, I think that is a form of ecological reparation in some ways, because this bird had been extinct [00:18:00] for, you know, over a hundred years.

So it’s an excellent partnership. And in researching it, I learned a lot about condors in general. They are Keystone species and as scavengers. Considerably large. I mean, their wingspan is like nine feet wide. Amazing. They’re very powerful. And they can basically rip apart an animal carcass so that it can be more easily consumed by smaller scavengers.

And this is really important in a place like the United States. We have really driven out bears and hunted wolves into, you know, relative extinction in many parts of the country. Normally [00:18:45] those are the kinds of predators that make a kill and leave the carcass behind for smaller scavengers to eat. But in the absence of those predators, The vulture and the condor come in and are able to make food marks, assessable to a variety of members of the food web.

So I thought that was really interesting.

[00:19:05] Crystal: And they help to keep diseases at bay because if you just have carcasses all over the place without anybody taking care of the carcasses, essentially, it can proliferate diseases.

[00:19:27] Emma: No, you’re absolutely right. And something that [00:19:30] I learned is that Condors have a specialized gastrointestinal microbiome. So their gut is insanely powerful. They can eat. Not just like the normal kinds of bacteria you would expect in something like roadkill, they can metabolize anthrax, botulism, even cholera.

They can eat things that are filled with these bacteria and be totally fine. So what you’re saying is absolutely right. So. What happened to the condor is I think a tale as old as time when it comes to large Raptors in the US DDT, the pesticide that was used until the mid 20th [00:20:15] century resulted in condor eggs being very delicate and condors accidentally squash there, their eggs in the nest, and that greatly impeded the survival of the population. Another obstacle that they faced and still face is that when people hunt with lead bullets, Condors, which are so adept at processing botulism, they will get lead poisoning. If they are eating from the carcass of something that was killed with a lead bullet.

[00:20:47] Crystal: That’s right. Eagles are having a similar problem.

[00:20:50] Emma: Yeah. So that’s a threat that they still face today, but hopefully this partnership, which is actually setting up shop in Redwood [00:21:00] national park is going to continue increasing the population of the California condor, or they’re going to be breeding them. They’re going to be releasing them.

And then they’re going to be outfitting them with satellite and radio transmitters to monitor their behavior and to the people participating in the program have their numbers and when they may need to intervene.

[00:21:22] Crystal: Amazing. And so I can’t let pass by an interesting fact that you had mentioned to me at another point in time, which was that they also reproduce asexually.

[00:21:34] Emma: Yeah. So this has only been seen of Condors that are in captivity. So it’s not a super viable way for the [00:21:45] population to reproduce out in the wild, but in captivity, a female condor has been observed to clone herself and have a Virgin birth. And cloning is often. Considered as kind of a fallback strategy for when population numbers of a certain species dip below a certain point, but it’s dangerous because when a female clones herself, she’s not adding any genetic diversity and therefore more defenseless against disease and things like that.

And inbreeding can lead to problems down the line. But I do think that it’s a really fascinating thing that has happened.

[00:22:23] Crystal: It’s important to note that DDT is actually still being sold in other parts of the world, it’s kind of [00:22:30] crazy and hard to believe. But I think one of the things that the listener can do to help this situation is very much like the Monarch butterfly that’s being impacted by pesticides.

The condor has been impacted by pestsicides indirectly because it has gone up the food chain basically. And so if you’re able to avoid pesticide use on your property, I mean, even if it’s not DDT, we don’t know the consequences of, of the pesticides that we’re using these days. The less you can use, the more natural remedies you can find, the better.

[00:23:03] Emma: I feel it’s time for me to make an obligatory anti-Roundup plug. Roundup is one of the most ubiquitous herbicides out there. And people [00:23:15] use it quite liberally, but it it’s active ingredient, glyphosate,is a pesticide that is not super well understood. And it’s suspected to have pretty negative effects on the environment and even on human health directly, including lowering sperm counts.

So if you can avoid Roundup, that is definitely a big thing that you can do.

[00:23:41] Crystal: Absolutely. I’m glad you brought that up. Well, this has been great. I feel better already to go on with my day. I really appreciate you sharing those stories with us. It’s it’s been wonderful.

[00:23:54] Emma: Absolutely. It’s my pleasure. [00:24:00]

[00:24:00] Crystal: Until next time.

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Do you know someone else who would enjoy this episode? I would be so grateful if you would share it with them. Hit me up on Instagram and Facebook @becoming.forces.for.nature and let me know what actions you have been taking. Adopting just one habit can be a game-changer because imagine if a million people also adopted that. What difference for the world are you going to make today? [00:24:45]