Beyond the Science Environmental Problems Cultural Solutions Paul K Doss TEDxEvansville

This image of the Cuyahoga River on fire in northern Ohio became an icon of sorts of the environmental movement. It caught fire 15 times by 1969. After that, in the first Earth Day in 1970, some really great things happened for environmental protection. Congress passed the Clean Water Act, the Safe Drinking Water Act, the Clean Air Act, the National Environmental Policy Act, the Endangered Species Act, and many others. They also established the Environmental Protection Agency. All of that during Republican administration. Those pieces of legislation did some great things for our environment and environmental protection. But, they picked what might call the low-hanging fruit. I'll let you in on little secret. Scientifically, it's pretty darn easy to fix river that catches on fire. Stop pouring gasoline on it. The environmental problems facing humanity today are much more complicated, much more complex and insidious than burning river. And their solution lies within our entrenched societal behavior. That's the sum of all of our individual behaviors. learned something when my wife and were fortunate enough to live and work in Yellowstone National Park. The park cops work in division known formally as visitor protection and resource management. They told me that they knew their job was protecting the resources and managing the visitors. It's the culture. It's the people that need management. And that's exactly where we are today with our environmental problems. We're not going to solve these problems until we face the biggest threat, and that's us, our behaviors. I'm really lucky right now to be involved in research along nearly pristine trout stream, the White River in Manistee National Forest, Michigan. I'm there because the Forest Service asked for some help. I'm on my lunch break in this picture here. The streams in West Central Michigan are they support trout, they support salmon spawning runs out of Lake Michigan, and they're sustained by groundwater. Now, this is something that gets somebody like me, an environmental hydrogeologist, kind of fired up and excited. This is groundwater very aggressively flowing out of the stream bed. It's literally making that stream. It's that continual inflow of groundwater that maintains stable stream levels. It maintains cool, stable temperatures all year long. It maintains nutrient inputs to that stream. If that groundwater is threatened, then the stream is threatened. And if the stream is threatened, the trout and salmon are threatened. And if the trout and salmon are threatened, well, the $2 billion year fishing industry in Michigan is threatened. So, why was the Forest Service concerned? Why did go up there? Well, because Nestlé's Ice Mountain bottled water company drilled two test wells to extract groundwater about 100 yards off the bank of the White River, the boundary with the National Forest, the border with your public land. Will pumping groundwater from adjacent to trout stream threaten that stream? Absolutely. How much? Well, trying to measure that threat and assess those impacts were the scientific questions that the Forest Service wanted some help trying to answer. But let's move beyond the science. Why are those questions even being asked? Well, it's because our society has an addiction to little plastic bottles of water. 30 billion plastic bottles every year just in the United States. We consume non-renewable fossil resources to manufacture and transport and distribute those bottles. Single-serving plastic bottles generate an enormous volume of waste, the far majority of which is not recycled. And extracting ground water for bottled water does pose very real threat to some aquatic resources. The only reason that those problems originate is because we choose to drink water out of little plastic bottles. We now have thing called the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. Thousands of square miles between California and Hawaii where human debris is trapped in gyre, very large circular ocean current. We might envision massive floating piles of garbage, but it's actually much more insidious than that. Most of it's tiny microplastics suspended in the water column. Plastic beads from beauty products, raw material plastics for manufacturing, the broken fragments and shards from our disposable lifestyle. Diana Parker from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration says if you tried to clean less than 1% of the North Pacific Ocean, it'd take 67 ships 1 year to clean. Until we stop that debris at its source, it's just going to continue to congregate in those areas. There's very real damage from this and from all of our behaviors. Nearly every dead albatross in the Hawaiian Island regions has plastic in its gut. Attracted to that plastic as if it were food. Many of them starve to death because their gut has no no room for real food. This isn't This isn't debris from cruise ships. This is the stuff that runs downstream. It's the stuff that flows off of our continents from our disposable throwaway society. Water is at the center of many of our environmental problems, as it should be. Senator Barry Goldwater once said, man from the West will fight over three things: water, women, and gold." And usually in that order. Water is environmental lifeblood. It's societal lifeblood. It's really amazing what we'll do to that which we need. Remember, we let river catch on fire 15 times. And then we actually had to draft federal law to stop it. This is noisy graph. And we'll talk about it briefly, but then then we'll move on and we'll go beyond the science. This graph is showing the concentrations of synthetic chemicals in streams of the United States. The US Geological Survey detected these chemicals in 80% of the streams that it sampled in our country. third of the streams had 10 or more of these chemicals. They're in low concentrations, but scientifically we don't really know what that means. We do know that they aren't removed by normal water treatment processes. What are the implications of exposure to low levels of testosterone and fire retardant in water? That's some challenging science. Do any of you want to volunteer for that clinical trial? Let's throw in some veterinary antibiotics and steroids and painkillers and opioids and plasticizers and insecticides. Now what? You know, fish and amphibians don't have choice. They're in clinical trial. We have detected intersex fish, male fish with egg cells, female-dominated fish populations in streams that are contaminated by estrogen. The problem of pharmaceuticals in our natural waters is cultural problem. And it'll only be solved when societal behavior changes. And in this case, that's when we and our livestock become less medicated. Science can't fix this problem. So, we had pretty cool total solar eclipse couple months ago. had the really good fortune of traveling with group of home school students, including our son David, to the path of totality. It was awesome. knew exactly where to go and precisely when to be there in order for those kids and my family to see totality. never heard anybody ever deny that this eclipse was going to happen. never heard anybody say that this eclipse was just big hoax. never heard anybody say, this eclipse is just way for bunch of geeky astronomers to get research funding." And yet I've heard all of those things said about climate change. Said by our policy makers. Well, the methods and approaches that we use to know when and where we can go observe an eclipse are exactly the same methods and approaches that we use to detect climate change. We use those methods to describe past climatic conditions. We use those methods to quantify changes that are happening to our climate right now. And we use those methods to predict the trajectory of climate change given our burning of fossil fuels. Science has done its job. The solution to climate change is almost entirely in societal hands now. Just like burning river, it needs strong leadership and sound policy to guide and change behavior. Maybe it is low-hanging fruit. You don't Stop dumping gasoline in river, the river doesn't burn. Stop dumping CO2 in the atmosphere, the globe doesn't warm. Scientifically, it's not that confusing, but I'll admit, it certainly is an inconvenient truth. We've had global-scale cultural successes to environmental problems before. The Montreal Protocol of the 1980s was the first universally ratified United Nations treaty. And it addressed the concern that some synthetic refrigerants and aerosol propellants chemically degraded stratospheric ozone. That's ozone that we like. We want that. It reduces the amount of ultraviolet radiation that reaches the earth's surface. This protocol gathered together global interest, and they developed policy and implemented solutions, and it appears to be working. The polar ozone holes are shrinking. The Stockholm Convention of the early 2000s addressed the issue of persistent organic pollutants, POPs. Certain POPs like DDT impact animals' ability to metabolize calcium. And it was that biochemistry that led our national symbol, the bald eagle, to become an endangered species. In the 1960s, there were only 500 breeding pairs of the bald eagle in the lower 48 states of the United States. Now, there's 10,000. Ironically, one of the very few countries that did not sign on to the Stockholm Convention was the owner of that national symbol, the United States. We degrade the resources that we depend upon. We unsustainably consume non-renewable resources and we greatly enhance our exposure to risk by modifying global environmental processes. Science has, with integrity, described those threats to our environment. It's quantified the impacts of those environmental threats to our environment. And it's predicted future impacts from the environmental threats that we face. The solution to these problems is is in societal hands at this point. We We have the ability to to solve these problems by modifying our individual behaviors. The solution is changing societal behaviors, which again is very simply collection of our individual behaviors. But the solution, changing behaviors on societal level, our own individual level, and that essentially equals our growth. Thank you.