104. Hope Springs Eternal

What's up, Plant People?? Living through all the *unprecedented times* we have been over the past few years has really gotten old. I think a lot fewer things should be getting precedented, but that's just me. We could all use a little more hope in our lives because, as Dr. Katharine Hayhoe discussed in Episode 102, it's the thing that drives us to change and positive action. Here at the beginning of Spring this year, I wanted to talk about a couple of stories I found recently which brought me a little bit of hope. Be good, be safe, and be kind, my friends, and never give up hope!

Reclaimed Coal Mine Story
Plants Are Better Than We Thought at Sequestering Carbon

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:10

What is up? Plant people. It's time once more for the Plantropology podcast, the show where we dive into the lives and careers of some very cool plant people to figure out why they do what they do and what keeps them coming back for more. I'm Vikram Beliga, your host and your humble guide in this journey through the sciences and, as always, my friends, I am so happy to be with you today. Y'all, I have today for you what I hope is an uplifting and fun and hopefully joyful episode, because it's spring.

Speaker 1: 0:38

As I record this, today is the 20th of March in the year 2024 for you future folks listening to this, or I guess you current folks listening to this as well, whatever, and the first day of spring was yesterday and I've been thinking a lot about what I wanted to put out for the first day of spring and the phrase hope springs eternal kept coming to mind for some reason, and I don't know if I heard it somewhere on the internet or social media or whatever, but it's just been stuck in my head. So I thought I would talk today about reasons we can be hopeful, or reasons that I'm hopeful, and some stories in the news and some conservation and climate change and other stories that have brought me hope, as well as some things that I've seen in my students and in my work that have made me hopeful, because I think that at the end of the day, when life is hard and when things are rough and sometimes bad like maybe they have been globally and they have been globally that it's our capacity for hope that drives us forward and keeps us going. So I just wanted to give you a bite sized, short little episode today to celebrate the beginning of spring and to maybe give you a little bit of hope in the midst of your day. So this will be a short one. We're not going to do a midroll, so I want to get some of the housekeeping out of the way here at the beginning. So first off, I want to thank you for listening and for being a part of Plainthropology. It's still and consistently and always will mean the world to me. Thanks to the Texas Tech Department of Plant and Soul Science for letting me do this show and for supporting it in the Davis College at Texas Tech as well, for being a part of the show and for being so supportive. Thanks to the PodFix Network for letting me be a part of it.

Speaker 1: 2:23

But some exciting news. Today, y'all, I have new podcast music and this is something I've been talking about, for if you've been following along for a while, literally like two years, and I've told myself for two years, you know, I'm going to record some, I'm going to write some podcast music and I'm going to record it and put it up here, and I clearly never have. So we've been rocking with our jangly music for a few years and I like it. I think you like it as well. But recently I've been thinking, you know, I would really really like to update it. And so a little while ago, maybe several weeks, my friend, lauren was talking about how her partner is a composer and has written music for movies and podcasts and stuff like that, and I was like, oh yeah, that would be super cool to have a custom song written. So I got in touch through Lauren and Nick Scout is the composer of our new music for Plantropology and we went back and forth a couple of times and he so well, I think, captured the warm and fun and folksy, I hope, or I like to think this show is folksy. Is it folksy? You let me know Nature of Plantropology. So here, in just a second. I'm going to play it for you and I'd love to hear your thoughts on it because I'm very excited about it. So a huge shout out to Nick Scout for recording this. Nick is now an award winning composer, which is just the coolest thing.

Speaker 1: 3:48

So, without any further ado, let's talk about some reasons to be hopeful. Let's listen to a great new bit of music from Nick Scout and get yourselves ready for episode 104 of the Plantropology podcast, hope Springs Eternal. You know, wasn't that fun. I enjoyed that so much, I am so happy with it, and so thanks again, nick, for all the work you put into this and for hearing my feedback and doing it a couple of times and just just working through it with me. Again, it means a lot and I am so happy to have some new music for the show.

Speaker 1: 4:40

So on that note, on a happy, joyous, warm and guitar note, let's jump into a short discussion about hope and the phrase hope springs eternal, because, again, I've been thinking about this a lot. So this phrase hope springs eternal the full quote is by Alexander Pope and it goes hope springs eternal in the human breast. Man never is, but always to be blessed. So we're always hoping to be blessed, and it's sort of tongue in cheek, as I think, opposed to how people use it sometimes, and it's really intended to say well, we continue to hope for things that probably won't happen. So I would love to win the lottery, but I probably won't. But hope springs eternal. I'm always hoping for that. Right. I would have to buy a lottery ticket, which I don't do, so that's maybe not a great example, but I think our capacity for hope again, and the hope, in spite of everything, to hope, even given the odds of something happening or not happening or whatever, is what makes us, in a lot of ways, so beautiful as a species, the fact that we are relentlessly and recklessly hopeful. Sometimes it drives us forward.

Speaker 1: 5:53

And I'm thinking back again to my episode from a couple of weeks ago with Dr Katherine Hayhoe, which, if you have not listened to that, please go check that out. Katherine is a sort of world-renowned climate scientist and communicator and is really just one of the most wonderful people I know. I really enjoyed that conversation, but something she said has also stuck with me, and that is that if we don't hope, we don't try, and so what she was talking about in that episode is in relation to climate change or any kind of I don't know disaster or hard thing that we deal with. A lot of people, unfortunately, as they communicate about it and then understand why is they catastrophize right? They talk about like, oh, everything is lost, like we've got five years to live, like we can't fix these problems. They're so big.

Speaker 1: 6:46

And in some ways, that sort of I don't know scare tactic is the right word. But that way of communicating, I think, is intended to like shock people into action, that, oh gosh, like we're in trouble, we need to do something, and there is something to that and that can be very important. But at the same time, if we do it to the extent where people don't have hope for a better future, they don't have hope that anything they do can deal with that problem, like we don't try, like we won't try, and in terms of all of the challenges we face, from human rights issues to climate change and food supply and everything in between, we have to hold on to our capacity to hope, because if we don't try, we won't solve it right. And so that has been on my mind so much the past few weeks, and I just recently lost my grandmother on my dad's side and something that I remember from her when I was growing up. Now she lived in India and I didn't like I spent time with her when I was younger and growing up, but not as much as I maybe did with some of my family here in the States, but she was always so like bright and hopeful and positive and just sort of a joy to be around.

Speaker 1: 8:08

And I think about my grandfather, too, who passed away back in 2020 on my mom's side, who who was also so hopeful, lived through hard times, lived through a lot of things, but always approached life with joy and hope and just sort of this like I don't know purity of spirit that I always found very you know, I was gonna say that I always found very inspirational, and I think I probably didn't as a kid, like I think it's only in retrospect, as an adult, that I look back and, I think, realize how much power and strength there is in joy and hope even foolish hope, even reckless hope. So I've been looking for things even through a busy and hectic and sort of wild and overwhelming several weeks of my life for things that bring me hope, and so I just wanted to talk about a few of the things I found, and one of the reasons I was looking for this too is I recently got to write a guest edit and be the guest editor for Catherine's newsletter. Catherine Heyho's newsletter Talking Climate and part of what she does in that is has a section in there about a good story, a hopeful story, a happy story, and as I was researching different kind of things that have happened in plant science or in the plant science space or the green space kind of in general over the past year that was hopeful and joyful and good good news I found a couple of things that I wanted to discuss and that really I thought were so cool. So the first one is actually one that I wrote about in the newsletter and this was a story that came out last July and it's a project that's been running for a while.

Speaker 1: 10:05

But there is a mine, a coal mine in East Texas, about an hour or so east of Waco by the big energy company NRG that operated for years and years, but in the 80s it was shut down in lieu of other sources of energy and other places to mine where you can do it more efficiently and there are more, I guess, efficient types of coal, and since then there have been reclamation efforts going on in this site and this is a very large mine 35,000 acres of this former mine and over time they've been working to fill in the holes from the mine and bring in clean soil and since the 70s. As these mining sites are being reclaimed, the companies that are in charge the companies that were mining the site are in charge of hoping to do ecological restoration on the site after the mines are closed down, and they're required to plant native grasses and native plants and match the ecosystem and the plant communities as closely as possible to the ones that would be there already to surrounding areas. But something that's really cool that's happening on this reclaimed mine site. Again, this is 35,000 acres total, which that's, by the way, a lot of acres. That's a lot of land, and on one acre of these 35,000 acres, since the energy dewy prairie garden I misspoke earlier, the mine was actually finally shut down completely and mining operations stopped in 2016, even though it had been sort of slowing down since the 80s and reclamation efforts started in the 80s.

Speaker 1: 11:49

But this prairie garden is a food production effort that's intended to serve the small town, jewett, that is right next to the mine, in fact, part of the mine stretches into part of the town and I don't know if you've ever spent much time in small town America, especially in small town Texas, but these are actually sort of vast food deserts where often there is not a grocery store, that there's not access or easy access to fresh produce, and a lot of times if you drive through a lot of small towns, they're driving 30, 40, 50 minutes in some cases to get to a grocery store that has fresh produce and you may think that, even though these are agricultural communities like they should have that, but a lot of times they don't. And some of our largest food deserts, especially in parts of Texas, are in rural communities, rural agricultural communities. So as part of this effort, this one acre garden was established and is run on volunteers and also by employees and things like that to produce food that would go partially into this town and since April 2022, when this farm began harvesting, they've produced more than 10,000 pounds of produce for six separate food pantries and has served probably 2,000 people per month in surrounding counties and in Jewett. And it's just such an incredible thing that this site that was sort of a net negative for the environment and, yes, the generation of power is important. We have to heat and cool and light our homes and run industry and all of that Like those things matter. But as a whole, 35,000 acres of what was once prairie and forest if you've ever been in east Texas there's both there's prairie land and there's forest land is a net loss, right as every tree matters today, as the amount of plants we have available to sequester carbon and all of those things like those things matter today and it's just such a cool and hopeful thing that we can take. We can take these things that maybe were causing problems, that were in a lot of ways causing problems, and a lot of mining operations add toxicity to the soil and things like that, and as that's been renewed and cleaned up, they've done testing to make sure that the produce is safe and they're feeding people. They're making sure that we're taking something that maybe was again a detriment to the environment and turned it into something beautiful and have reclaimed the natural landscape but have also found ways to feed hungry people, to address food insecurity, and I just think that's such a cool example of the things we can accomplish when, one, we're creative and, two, when we work together as individuals and industry and people who are advocating for the climate to do a better job, and so that gives me hope. It gives me hope that not just this, but there are community garden and grassroots food web efforts happening all over the country and we're finding more ways to take care of folks and we're finding more ways to feed people that are hungry, to address those types of insecurities, that we're adding more equity and building more equity into our society. That gives me hope.

Speaker 1: 15:30

Another article I read that I think was very cool and very interesting, and this is again sort of preliminary research and modeling. But there's a study done at Trinity College in Dublin that shows that plants may be able to absorb more carbon dioxide from human activities than previously expected. So let's talk real briefly about photosynthesis. My students just took a test on photosynthesis and they did very well, which also gives me hope. I'm going to talk about academics and my students here in a minute, but the basics are plants use water from the ground, power from the sun and carbon dioxide from the atmosphere to produce sugar. That sugar is stored in the plant, it goes to the mitochondria to produce energy and ATP to grow the plant. Blah, blah, blah. So essentially, plants are turning carbon dioxide and sunlight into everything else everything else the food that we eat, the clothes that we wear. There are big, massive engines that process sunlight into everything else, which is super cool.

Speaker 1: 16:35

But it was thought that, combined with climate change, their capacity to scrub carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere may be limited. So on one hand, the CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere increase to a certain point, plants actually kind of like that. Right, they actually do pretty well on that. There's more carbon dioxide available, the sunlight is plentiful, and so they're able to photosynthesize at a higher rate and they actually sequester a lot of carbon. But there's a lot of research and a lot of modeling that shows that there's an inflection point. Once we hit certain temperature thresholds, once droughts become worse, when solar intensity gets higher, all of these different things can be reduced. So a lot of the modeling that goes into the capacity of plants to deal with climate change and climate issues shows that in the next 100 years or so we're going to start to see diminishing returns as temperatures increase for our plants' ability to sequester carbon. So even though we're planting more trees, we're reclaiming prairies, we're also going to be able to restore the climate as it gets hotter, it can become a problem, but new models have taken into account some of the different complexities in the way that plants grow, in the way that they pull in and process and trap carbon, in the way they photosynthesize.

Speaker 1: 17:59

Because, it turns out, we're always learning new things. And plants are so calm, they're so calm, they're so calm, they're so calm, they're so calm, they're so calm, they're so calm, they're so calm, they're so calm, they're so calm, they're so calm, they're so calm, they're so calm, they're so calm, they're so calm. So the two elements that we're talking about today, one is these learning new things. And plants are so complex and their systems are so incredibly powerful in a lot of ways that it actually looks like they may be able to fix carbon and sequester carbon and photosynthesize at higher rates than production and industry in life. Like we do need to take those steps absolutely to reduce the amount of CO2 and other carbon-based gases that we're putting into the atmosphere.

Speaker 1: 18:48

However, it looks like plants are still kind of doing the thing right and as we move forward through the 21st century, we're gonna find more and more out about them, and it turns out that maybe some of the models we're seeing now are a little more hopeful and a little more optimistic, not that we can stop making efforts, not that we can stop progressing, but that maybe we have a little more time, that the planet is fighting for itself and fighting for us as we go, and that we have the ability and the time and the technology and the hope to figure out these problems. Because, again, as Catherine said, it's because of hope that we move forward. It's because we are able to see, oh, I can make a difference, oh, this can be better, that we continue to try. That's a cool thing for me to think about that, even though things may be bad and we may struggle with a lot of the stuff going on in the world, which I know I do, and it's hard sometimes for me to watch the news and hear about everything that's going on and think about like is what I do? Important are the things I'm teaching students about plants and about the environment and the climate. Like doesn't even matter. Are we going to even have this to deal with in 50 years? Right? Are we still going to have something out there and reading stories like these? That we're taking old mining sites and turning them into food production? That we're still learning about our environment and nature and plants and their capacity to fight some of these changes on the planet Like that gives me so much hope.

Speaker 1: 20:35

The other thing that has brought me so much hope this semester is my students, and teaching is complicated Whether you're teaching at the first grade level, kindergarten up through graduate school. We see so much from our students and they work hard and they do all these things, but they're struggling with things too. But I think this semester has been maybe the most engaged class I've had. They answer questions, they talk to me. We get some back and forth. When I see them outside of class, they're super cool about saying hi and things like that, which is fun for me. I like that. If you see me at the grocery store, say hi. If you see me at the coffee shop, say hi. If you see me at the gym which probably is not going to happen just let me struggle, just let me suffer in peace, just leave me alone, okay. But grocery store, coffee shop, whatever, yeah, come, say hi, let's hang out, let's talk.

Speaker 1: 21:27

But I've seen so much like I don't know inquisitiveness and enthusiasm and just a capacity to work and try and learn in my students this semester that it's really been good for me as an educator. It's really done a lot for me and my wife will tell you, and probably anyone that's been around me, that I'm like I've been super worn out the past few months and I still am to a certain extent. But I find that like going to class is super exciting because I know that at least some of the students in my class are really like passionate and they really care about the environment, they really care about learning about the material and photosynthesis y'all is not the most exciting thing. Like I think it's cool and it's exciting to learn how it works, but you know we get into the biochemistry of it, like for the most part, like there's a lot of glazed over faces looking at me and let's not get it. I do. But the fact that they're still like coming to class and asking good questions and conversing and you know we have a project coming up where they do science communication and they can record a podcast or make a video, and we talked about it yesterday in class and after class several students came up like, oh, I had this idea. I think this would be cool to do, where I'd like to go about it in this way and do all these things Like that's so cool for me to hear here, and so I don't know if any of my students listened to this current, present, past, whatever, but I want y'all to know that you're an inspiration to me, like even when you're frustrating and I'm sure I frustrate you right back Like the fact that you are dedicated to learning, the fact that you're in college and going about like improving your education and your knowledge, and that you're trying to do better for yourself and do something good for yourself in your life, but also to maybe make the world a little bit better in the process, like it means a lot.

Speaker 1: 23:33

It means a lot to me, and even on days where maybe it doesn't mean a lot to you, I hope you know that at least I appreciate it, and I know a lot of your other professors do as well. So thanks for giving me hope. I really do appreciate that a lot. And there's so many other things. Lately my son, bradley, has been bringing home, like nature, books from school. So every Thursday I think they get to check out a book from the library and bring it home, and he's been bringing home to actually every week, and so many of them have been about plants, like plant books about seeds and how they grow, or animal books, and they're not just like necessarily like stories Sometimes they're story books or funny story books or whatever but like he checks out a lot of nonfiction and as an educator and as a children's author, y'all that is so cool to me, that's so cool. So thanks to Bradley, too, for giving me hope.

Speaker 1: 24:33

And if you are also a longtime listener of Plainthropology, you've heard his little voice several times over the years. I think he was three years old, about to turn four, the first time. He was on the podcast, like episode five or something in the way back when it's a fun one, you should go back and listen to it. He's been on a couple times, so this summer I'm going to try to talk him into doing that again. He's like eight now and so his little voice is less little. And he's got other things like returning to the minds. He plays a lot of Minecraft. Children yearn for the mines. But I hope he'll come talk to me again, because I would look for you to hear from him too. Maybe he'll give you some hope as well. He, by the way and this has nothing to do with the rest of the episode is me. I Hope the good parts of me. But you know he's funny. He's funny but like super sarcastic, and I hear things come out of his mouth and I'm like, oh yeah, I earned that one, like like I'm paying for something in my past when he says some stuff to me sometimes. But anyway, so stay tuned, maybe the summer will have an episode with Bradley, but y'all, I know I rambled a little bit.

Speaker 1: 25:41

This is very much like stream of consciousness for me, because I I just want you to know, I just want you to know that there are people out there fighting for all of us, that there are Stories like the ones we talked about today and thousands more of people who are still doing good and Still trying hard and still fighting the fight for you and for me and for the planet and for everything else. And I think that some days maybe we should turn off the, the news cycle and the Talking heads that are talking about how bad things are, and not to discount that things are rough right now because they are, but look for things that are positive, look for things that are good. Find ways to hope in your life, because, y'all, that's what we need. We need more hopeful people that are willing to turn their hope into action, and I hope that to you. I think it is so many of you. But y'all, that's all I have for today. Again, it's a short one. I've got three or four great interviews coming up soon, but I just wanted to tell you that you mean a lot to me and that the conversations I get to have with y'all and the back and forth like that gives me hope to and it Brings me so much joy.

Speaker 1: 27:00

So thanks for listening, thanks for being a part of Planthropology and everything we do here. Thanks for sharing it with your friends. If you have the time, tell someone about Planthropology who you think may like hearing stories about plants and nature and all those things. Leave a rating and review on pod chaser, apple podcast or Spotify or wherever you can. But, more importantly, just tell a friend about planthropology and if you have comments or feedback, hit me up on social media. I am either the plant prof or planthropology or planthropology pod pretty much everywhere a Facebook, instagram, tiktok, twitter or whatever Twitter is now and you can send me an email at planthropology pod, a gmailcom. You can find all things planthropology at planthropology pod cast calm, pick up some merch or Just see a backlog of all the episodes. You can find this on your favorite podcast player. I hope you'll hit subscribe.

Speaker 1: 27:54

Thanks again to the tech tech department of plant and soil science and the Davis College for letting me do this. Thanks to the pod fix network. Thanks to the wonderful and award-winning composer, nick scout, for the song if you want to love me, babe, which is the new theme music of planthropology, which you're about to hear again in a second. I love you, folks. Thanks for being a part of this. Keep being kind to one another. If you have not to date been kind to one another, maybe give that a shot. It's a good way to be. Keep being a very cool plant, people, and I will talk to you next time.